Remdesivir, an experimental drug which has been tested as treatment for the coronavirus has proved to be effective against the coronavirus in a major study, and helping to reduce patient recovery time by an average of four days. The U.S. government and company officials announced this information on Wednesday.
Gilead Sciences’s Remdesivir has so far been the first treatment to pass such a strict test against the virus, which has killed more than 218,000 people since its outbreak in the latter part of 2019 in China. The availability of a treatment could have a profoundly good effect on the global pandemic, because health officials say any vaccine is likely a year or more away.
The National Institutes of Health, ran the study and tested remdesivir versus usual care in 1,063 hospitalized coronavirus patients around the world. At the White House, NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci said the drug reduced the time it takes patients to recover by 31%, 11 days on average versus 15 days for those just given usual care.
He also said that fewer deaths occurred among those on remdesivir, and that full results would soon be published in a medical journal.
“What it has proven is that a drug can block this virus,” Fauci said. “This will be the standard of care."
The Food and Drug Administration issues a statement that says the agency has been talking with California-based Gilead “regarding making remdesivir available to patients as quickly as possible, as appropriate.”
Remdesivir is the farthest along in the study among many other treatments undergoing testing against the coronavirus.
“We are excited and optimistic,” said one expert, Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Mark Denison whose lab first tested remdesivir against other coronaviruses in 2013 and has done a lot more research on it since then, but was not involved in the NIH study.
“It’s active against every coronavirus that we’ve ever tested,” he said. “It was very hard for the virus to develop resistance to remdesivir. That means the drug would likely be effective over longer term use.”
The company also informed that there no new safety problems emerged in that study, and that results would be published in a medical journal soon.
