Credit: Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash. 

 

All over the world, clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19 are being conducted at record speeds, largely thanks to a massive pooling of resources in the scientific community.

 

Preliminary results for the first 4 treatments that were selected for testing in WHO's Solidarity trial at the beginning of the pandemic are now available. They indicate that remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir and interferon regimens appeared to have little or no effect on 28-day mortality or the in-hospital course of COVID-19 among hospitalized patients. This does not necessarily exclude their usefulness as prophylaxis or at different stages of the disease, but confirming this requires further studies.

 

These findings are corroborated by France's DisCoVeRy trial, where the study arms were gradually closed over the past months, as data did not support their effectiveness. The remdesivir arm, however, is still ongoing.

 

The University of Oxford's RECOVERY trial yielded positive results for severe presentations of the disease in hospitalized patients, having found a significant reduction in mortality with the use of dexamethasone. Lack of results for hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir-ritonavir, like Solidarity and DisCoVeRy, lead to the termination of these study arms.

 

With these congruous results across multiple studies, the focus has now shifted to other treatments. Solidarity is considering newer antiviral drugs, immunomodulators and anti-SARS COV-2 monoclonal antibodies for evaluation, and RECOVERY has opened new study arms for tocilizumab, convalescent plasma and REGN-COV2.

 

Similarly, the USA's NIH will also be assessing immunomodulators like abatacept, infliximab and cenicriviroc as part of the ACTIV initiative.

 

Over 2000 studies are still ongoing worldwide, covering a vast range of therapies, in hopes that effective treatment may be found to aid the current efforts in curbing the impact of recent growing infections rates.

 

Melanie Salgado

Pharmacist and Medication Content Analyst

ALERT Life Sciences Computing