Stanford seeks volunteers with long COVID
Stanford Medicine is seeking volunteers for the nation’s first clinical trial looking at whether the antiviral drug Paxlovid can fight one of COVID-19’s thorniest problems affecting millions of people: the long-term, debilitating suite of symptoms known as long COVID.
There are currently no treatments, and many people turn to risky, unproven methods to try to cure themselves.
Researchers hope the trial will also shed light on the mystery of why an estimated 1 in 5 infected people develops the persistent aftereffects that include brain fog, chronic fatigue, erratic blood pressure, shortness of breath and many others.
One hypothesis is that bits of the COVID-causing coronavirus remain hidden in the body, wreaking havoc, said Upinder Singh, a Stanford infectious disease expert who is running the trial with Dr. Linda Geng, co-director of the medical center’s long COVID clinic.
“Data indicates that may be the case,” Singh said. The hope, she said, is that a drug known to work against COVID would also “target that residual virus” in the body. She said the team hopes to report results next summer.
The idea received a boost this month when the Veterans Administration released a preliminary study of more than 56,000 people who had had COVID. The study, which had not been peer-reviewed, found a 25% lower risk of long COVID symptoms in the 9,217 who had taken Paxlovid in the first five days of their infection.
Paxlovid is a protease inhibitor — from the same class of drugs used to treat HIV infection — that stops the virus from replicating. It’s been shown to cut the chance of hospitalization and death by up to 88%.
Doctors typically prescribe a five-day course. Many people quickly find relief, but some see their symptoms bounce back soon after, in what’s called Paxlovid rebound.
“That’s one of the reasons we chose a 15-day course of Paxlovid instead of five days,” Singh said of the new clinical trial. “Our regimen is 3 times as long.”
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the Stanford trial.
Researchers expect to study 200 people who have persistent long COVID symptoms, and will follow them for 4½ months with the help of a digital device to monitor progress.
In the double-blind study, researchers won’t know which participants got Paxlovid and which got a placebo.
Study participant William Fimbres of Mountain View is pretty sure he got the real thing. He began his 15-day course of Paxlovid on Monday and said the pill has already given him a metallic taste in his mouth.
Fimbres, 67, retired from Fimbres Bros. Auto Repair shop in Palo Alto in early 2020, just before COVID hit. In August 2021, just when he had decided on his next retirement project — fixing up a pretty red Alfa Romeo — he got COVID.
It never went away. Hit with the old delta strain, he lost his senses of taste and smell. Though he can taste certain things like the metallic taste of the pill, his wife had to alert him the other day that the chicken was burning. And when his dogs recently began rolling around strangely, his son had to tell him that they had been skunked.
But even worse is the brain fog and fatigue.
“I have no memory,” he said. “My balance is off, and some days I need to use the wall to walk.”
If he goes out with his buddies for breakfast on a Friday, as he’s done for 25 years, he needs a two-hour nap just to recover. And forget about the Alfa Romeo project.
“We used to build motors at the shop. But I look at the motor now and I’m totally lost,” Fimbres said. “I’m hoping that something will come from this study that will clear the fog.”