New antiviral drug combo shows promise against COVID-19: Study

BEIJING: A two-week course of an antiviral therapy, started within seven days of experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, may improve clinical recovery of patients and reduce their hospital stay duration, according to the first randomised trial of this triple drug combination.

The study, published in the journal The Lancet, involved 127 adults from six public hospitals in Hong Kong, and tested the effectiveness of an antiviral drug combination in reducing the load of the novel Coronavirus in their bodies.

According to the researchers, including those from the University of Hong Kong, treatment involving combination of the drugs interferon beta-1b, plus the antiviral therapy lopinavir-ritonavir and ribavirin, is better at reducing the viral load than lopinavir-ritonavir alone.

They stressed on the need for larger phase 3 trials to examine the effectiveness of this triple combination in critically ill patients, adding that these early findings were only observed in patients with mild to moderate illness.

Clinical improvement and

length of hospital stay may be significantly shorter in people treated with the triple drug combination less than seven days after showing symptoms, compared to lopinavir-ritonavir alone, the scientists said. Based on earlier studies on influenza, in which patients have high quantities of the virus in their bodies when the symptoms begin to appear, they said treating hospitalised patients with a combination of multiple antiviral drugs may be more effective than single drug treatments.