COVID-19 patients on the antiviral remdesivir recovered more than 30 percent faster than those on a placebo, the results of a major clinical trial showed Wednesday as a top US scientist hailed the drug’s “clear-cut” benefit.
It represents the first time any medication has been shown to improve outcomes against the COVID-19 illness, which has claimed more than 200,000 lives globally and brought the world economy to a grinding halt.
A statement by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that Fauci heads said that patients on the drug had a 31 percent faster time to recovery than those on a placebo.
“Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo,” it said.
The results also suggested that people who were on the drug were less likely to die. The mortality rate was 8.0 percent for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6 percent for the placebo group.
Remdesivir, which previously failed in trials against Ebola, belongs to a class of drugs that act on the virus directly — as opposed to controlling the abnormal and often lethal autoimmune response it causes.
It mimics one of the four building blocks of RNA and DNA and gets absorbed into the virus’s genome, which in turn stops the pathogen from replicating.
A summary of results posted on the website of the World Health Organization last week showed it failed in a smaller Chinese trial. The Lancet on Wednesday published the formal paper describing that experiment.
In this study of 237 patients in Wuhan, China, doctors found no positive effects of administering the drug compared with a control group of adults, except for those patients who required ventilators.
Other therapies that are being studied include collecting antibodies from COVID-19 survivors and injecting them in patients, or harvesting antibodies from genetically-engineered mice that were deliberately infected.
