WASHINGTON: The top US infectious disease official said on Wednesday Gilead Sciences’s experimental anti-viral drug remdesivir will become the standard of care for Covid-19 after early results from a key clinical trial showed it helped patients recover more quickly from the illness caused by coronavirus.

Preliminary results from a US government trial showing that patients given remdesivir recovered 31 per cent faster than those given a placebo, were hailed by Dr Anthony Fauci as “highly significant”. “This is really quite important,” Fauci told reporters at the White House, likening it to a moment in 1986 “when we were struggling for drugs for HIV and we had nothing”.

“This will be the standard of care,” he said, adding “the FDA ... is working with Gilead to figure out mechanisms to make this easily available to those who need it.

Gilead said earlier on Wednesday the trial was positive, and provided additional data suggesting remdesivir worked better when given earlier in the course of illness, sending its shares up more than seven per cent.

The closely watched drug, which is given by intravenous infusion to hospitalised patients, has moved markets in the past few weeks following the release of data from several studies that painted a mixed picture of its effectiveness, and Fauci cautioned that the latest data still needs to be analysed.

Interest in Gilead’s drug has been high as there are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for Covid-19, and doctors are desperate for anything that might alter the course of the disease that attacks the lungs and can shut down other organs in severe cases, until a preventive vaccine emerges.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, said early results from its 1,063-patient trial show that hospitalised patients given remdesivir recovered in 11 days, compared to 15 days for patients given a placebo.

The study showed a trend toward better survival for remdesivir – eight percent of patients given the drug died, compared with 11.6% in the placebo group - but the difference was not statistically significant so may not be due to Gilead’s drug.

“It is the first truly high-powered randomized placebo-controlled trial,” Fauci said.

Testing the drug against a placebo can give researchers a definitive answer on whether remdesivir is having an effect.

GLIMMER OF HOPE

Despite the excitement, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, global fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington, DC, was not ready to celebrate the preliminary findings.

The new data “offers a glimmer of hope” that remdesivir has an effect against COVID-19, but more scientific analysis is needed “comparing them to other studies of the drug that have shown mixed results,” he said in a statement.

Also on Wednesday, results were published by the Lancet medical journal of a trial conducted in China that concluded remdesivir failed to improve patients condition or reduce the pathogens presence in the bloodstream.

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2020