More than 60% of a group of severely ill COVID-19 patients showed improvement when treated with remdesivir, an antiviral drug currently being tested in several studies globally, SIA reports.
The preliminary results published in the New England Journal of Medicine did not have a control group, meaning that more research is required to better determine if the drug could help sick coronavirus patients. Nonetheless, 36 of the 53 patients treated with the drug or 68% of the group showed improvement.
The patients in the US, Italy, France, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and Canada received the drug intravenously for at least ten days. Seventeen of 30 patients treated with the drug while requiring mechanical ventilation improved. Eight patients saw a worsening of disease. A total of seven patients, or 13%, died.
The differences in outcome could also be due to differences in hospitals and supportive care but the doctors who wrote the study concluded that the drug could be helpful in cases of severe COVID-19 illness.
There have been 1.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 100,000 people have died but there is currently no existing treatment for the virus that caused a global pandemic. "Although data from several ongoing randomised, controlled trials will soon provide more informative evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of remdesivir for Covid-19, the outcomes observed in this compassionate-use program are the best currently available data," the doctors wrote in the study published on Friday.
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