Promising drug to undergo clinical trial
In the first clear signal that a drug can effectively treat those sickened by the coronavirus, government researchers reported Wednesday that the antiviral medication remdesivir helped patients with advanced COVID-19 recover more quickly than a placebo treatment.
The early results, emerging from a large clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appears to position the drug as the standard therapy for hospitalized COVID-19 patients going forward.
In the trial, patients who received remdesivir recovered 31% faster than those who received a placebo, a finding of superiority that could not be attributed to chance, researchers reported. Specifically, half of the patients who were randomly selected to be treated with remdesivir were considered completely recovered within 11 days, and half of those patients took longer. By comparison, it took 15 days for half of those who received the placebo to recover.
The results also suggested that patients who were given remdesivir were more likely to survive COVID-19 than were those who got the placebo. But the difference in fatality rates — 8% for the group that took the drug versus 11.6% for the placebo group — fell slightly below the cutoff point at which researchers could rule out a statistical fluke.
Remdesivir was originally designed by Californiabased Gilead Sciences Inc. as a drug to treat Ebola disease. But since it was less effective than other medications for that use, the experimental drug never entered full-scale production.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, hailed the new findings as a “really quite important” milestone in the scramble to find any effective treatment for a pandemic that has claimed more than 224,000 lives around the world, including 58,355 in the United States.
“What (the clinical trial) has proven is that a drug can block this virus,” Fauci said on Wednesday in the Oval Office of the White House. “This drug happens to be blocking an enzyme that the virus uses.”
Indeed, the benefits were so clear that researchers halted this portion of the trial early. As they move on to investigate other drugs against COVID-19, researchers will give all trial participants remdesivir and will make the antiviral the new standard against which other drugs are compared, Fauci said.
“Whenever you have clear-cut evidence that a drug works,” he explained, “you have an ethical obligation to immediately let the people who are in the placebo group know so that they could have access.”
Fauci added that after the data had been analyzed more completely, “some of the numbers may change a little, but the conclusion will not change.”
Fauci, who took the helm of the infectious-disease agency in 1984, likened the new findings to the 1986 discovery that the anti-retroviral drug azidothymidine, or AZT, could suppress the HIV virus in patients with AIDS. That drug, which became known as Retrovir, marked the beginning of a turnaround that transformed HIV infection from a death sentence into a manageable chronic health condition.
On Wednesday, Fauci suggested the remdesivir results could upend a welter of other clinical trials now underway to explore potential treatments for COVID-19.