A drug cocktail hastens recovery in some patients

Patients with mild to moderate COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, appeared to improve more quickly if they were treated with a three-drug cocktail, compared with a group receiving just a twodrug combination, scientists reported Friday.

With vaccines still months, maybe years, into the future, researchers are rushing to determine whether existing drugs can be used to treat the coronavirus. In the United States, only one — remdesivir — has been shown to be effective in speeding recovery.

In the new study, published in The Lancet, researchers at six public hospitals in Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong followed 127 adults with COVID-19, including 86 on the threedrug cocktail and 41 in a comparison group.

Their study was a preliminary Phase 2 trial, intended to see if a treatment works. (It does not determine whether the treatment is better than other options, but there are few other options for the coronavirus.)

The patients who were started on the cocktail within seven days of having their first symptoms stopped shedding the virus — meaning they were recovering and no lon- ger infectious — earlier than patients in the comparison group, the researchers found.

In Hong Kong, even those with mild disease are hos- pitalized. The patients on the triple-drug combination also appeared to get better faster, and they had signifi- cantly shorter hospital stays than the comparison group, according to the study.

Included in the cocktail were three antiviral drugs: lopinavir-ritonavir, taken orally; ribavirin, an antiviral drug used to treat hepatitis C, also taken orally; and interferon beta-1b, an injectable drug used to treat multiple sclerosis that regulates inflammation and suppresses viral growth.

Some experts have suggested interferon may boost the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus.

Participants in the compar- ison group of the trial were treated only with lopinavir-ritonavir, which some physicians have stopped using after a recent clinical trial found it did not significantly improve outcomes in severely ill COVID-19 patients.

Patients given the threedrug cocktail tested negative for the coronavirus within seven days, on average, compared with an average 12 days among those treated with the one drug. The cocktail also cut the duration of COVID19 symptoms in half, to four days from eight days.

“This is good news,” said Dr. Sarah Shalhoub, an infectious disease specialist at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “It tells us that patients get better faster, and the time they need to be hospitalized is shorter, and their viral shedding is of shorter duration.”