The anti-Ebola drug remdesivir has shown major promise in a global clinical trial involved Covid-19 patients, it was announced last night.
The findings will be encouraging after a Chinese trial had to be halted through a shortage of patients. Laboratory stories had suggested it had promise against the coronavirus.
The global trial has involved more than a thousand patients in 75 hospitals.
Researchers say that patients who received the drug recovered 31% faster than those who received placebo.
It also reduced death rates by more than three percentage points – from 11.6% to 8%, according to preliminary results released by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The trial included 46 patients in the UK and 33 in Greece with treatment delivered by drip.
Professor Mahesh Parmar, director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London, UK, who has been overseeing the trial in the EU, said: “These results are very promising indeed. They show that this drug can clearly improve time to recovery. Before this drug can be made more widely available, a number of things need to happen: the data and results need to be reviewed by the regulators to assess whether the drug can be licensed and then they need assessment by the relevant health authorities in various countries.
"While this is happening we will obtain more and longer term data from this trial, and other ones, on whether the drug also prevents deaths from Covid-19.”
Fellow researcher Professor Abdel Babiker, medical statistician at UCL, said: “These are very encouraging results from the first large randomised international trial to report on the treatment of Covid-19. To speed up the identification of effective treatments the design of this trial is adaptive which facilitates the speedy identification of effective treatment by testing promising agents as they come along in different stages of the trial.
“These results are from the first stage and other stages are being planned. Conducting clinical trials during a pandemic is very challenging and the accomplishment of this stage in record time is testament to the strong international collaboration and the flexibility of the regulatory authorities and Ethics committees in adopting a fast-tracked but rigorous evaluation in their approval process.”
* Chinese doctors have achieved promising results with the antibody treatment tocilizumab, it was announced last night.
Doctors in the Anhui Province tested the drug on 21 critically ill patients, according to a reported released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The drug binds to the IL-6 receptor.
All patients recovered and in all cases body temperature returned to normal within 24 hours of treatment, the researchers reported.
* The UK yesterday promised to "fast track" new treatments. A national trial, to be launched within weeks, will seek to assess six drugs simultaneously. The drugs have not yet been selected and will be put forward by pharmaceutical companies or academic researchers.
Xiaoling Xu et al. Effective treatment of severe COVID-19 patients with tocilizumab. PNAS 29 April 2020
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