New virus treatments expected this fall, but how powerful will they be?
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is hoping that a sophisticated new drug treatment to prevent people from getting severely ill from COVID19 will be available to the public by this fall.
But experts in the field say that treatments most likely to reach the market in September or October are more modest, repurposed therapeutic drugs meant to treat late-stage symptoms of the illness.
Hundreds of treatments and antivirals are currently undergoing U.S. clinical trials. But the potential drugs that are furthest along in the process are medications already on the market to treat other illnesses or have been under review for many years.
Many of those are antiinflammatory and blood clot treatments that could mitigate the severity of the disease, decrease hospital stays and reduce fatalities.
The success of these more modest drugs would be less dramatic than a tailor-made treatment that could prevent the disease from progressing to a lifethreatening state. But they could still alter the dynamics of an expected autumn wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, which already has taken over 138,000 lives and continues to ripple across the country.
“If you look at the pipeline, there are more shots on goal on the treatment side—the late-stage inflammatory issues,” said David Thomas, vice president of industry research at BIO, a major trade association representing biotechnology companies and institutions .“The goal would be to have more therapeutics that would decrease the severity of the late-stage disease.”
The hope is that these drugs might help lower the death toll and the burden on intensive care units in hospitals.
Experts compare the impact of these drugs to that of remdesivir, the most prominent repurposed, antiviral treatment currently available to corona virus patients. The drug is produced by Gilead Sciences and was originally tested for its effectiveness against other infectious diseases, including the SARS and MERS coronaviruses.
Preliminary clinical trials on the effects of remdesivir in coronavirus patients found that the drug has reduced hospitalization times. More robust clinical trials will be necessary to determine the extent to which the drug helps patients recover.
“You have this emergent need for therapeutics, and people are taking everything they have off the shelf,” said Dr. Lawrence Blatt, chief executive officer of Aligos Therapeutics, a California-based biotechnology company currently working on a therapeutic candidate for COVID-19. “The net result is that most of the therapeutics that are in clinical trials right now are either not going to be effective or will have marginal benefit.”
“Let's think of it like a lock and key. Each virus has its own lock,” Blatt continued. “If you took your key from one door and tried to unlock another door, it wouldn't work very well. You have to make a key for that door specifically.”
A specific “key” is the gold standard for a coronavirus treatment, and is the current goal of the federal government, which this month placed a $450 million bet on an experimental drug cocktail that could help infected individuals beat back the coronavirus at earlier stages of infection — or even prevent infection in the first place.
“We are investing in the candidates that are furthest along so that we could have products by early fall of 2020,” a senior administration official working on Operation Warp Speed, the government program to expedite the discovery and production of a coronavirus vaccine, said referring to therapeutics.
“While we think it is fair to say that vaccine progress is occurring at `warp speed' pace, faster than any vaccine has been developed in history, therapeutics are even faster, and we believe we'll have new options for saving American lives as soon as the early fall,” the official told reporters last week.