drugs

Conclusions and Relevance In this randomized clinical trial of ambulatory patients diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infection, treatment with high-dose zinc gluconate, ascorbic acid, or a combination of the 2 supplements did not significantly decrease the duration of symptoms compared with standard of care.

Conclusion
Patients given remdesivir are more likely to demonstrate recovery and were associated with higher rates of hospital discharge, but not with significant reduction in mean time to clinical improvement or mortality.

Bastard said he hopes his findings will lead to new therapies that save lives. He noted that the body manufactures many types of interferons. Giving patients a different type of interferon — one not disabled by their genes or autoantibodies — might help them fight off the virus.

In fact, a pilot study of 98 patients published Thursday in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal found benefits from an inhaled form of interferon. In the industry-funded British study, hospitalized Covid-19 patients randomly assigned to receive interferon beta-1a were more than twice as likely as others to recover enough to resume their regular activities.

Researchers need to confirm the findings in a much larger study, said Dr. Nathan Peiffer-Smadja, a researcher at Imperial College London who wasn't involved in the study but wrote an accompanying editorial. Future studies should test patients' blood for genetic mutations and autoantibodies against interferon to see whether they respond differently from others.

Peiffer-Smadja said inhaled interferon may work better than an injected form of the drug because it's delivered directly to the lungs. While injected versions of interferon have been used for years to treat other diseases, the inhaled version is still experimental and not commercially available.

And doctors should be cautious about interferon for now, because a study led by the World Health Organization found no benefit to an injected form of the drug in Covid-19 patients, Peiffer-Smadja said. In fact, there was a trend toward higher mortality rates in patients given interferon, although the finding could have been due to chance. Giving interferon later in the course of disease could encourage a destructive immune overreaction called a cytokine storm, in which the immune system does more damage than the virus.

Around the world, scientists have launched more than 100 clinical trials of interferons, according to clinicaltrials.gov, a database of research studies from the National Institutes of Health.

Until larger studies are completed, doctors say, Bastard's findings are unlikely to change how they treat Covid-19.

Catteau et al. conducted a retrospective analysis of in-hospital mortality using Belgian national COVID-19 hospital surveillance data (n=8,075) and found that, after adjusting for clinical and demographic features, mortality was lower among patients who received low-dose hydroxychloroquine (2400 mg over 5 days) compared to supportive care alone (HR=0.7, 95%CI: 0.6-0.

As the world awaits vaccines to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, UC San Francisco scientists have devised a novel approach to halting the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease.

Led by UCSF graduate student Michael Schoof, a team of researchers engineered a completely synthetic, production-ready molecule that straitjackets the crucial SARS-CoV-2 machinery that allows the virus to infect our cells. As reported in a new paper, now available on the preprint server bioRxiv, experiments using live virus show that the molecule is among the most potent SARS-CoV-2 antivirals yet discovered.

In an aerosol formulation they tested, dubbed “AeroNabs” by the researchers, these molecules could be self-administered with a nasal spray or inhaler. Used once a day, AeroNabs could provide powerful, reliable protection against SARS-CoV-2 until a vaccine becomes available. The research team is in active discussions with commercial partners to ramp up manufacturing and clinical testing of AeroNabs. If these tests are successful, the scientists aim to make AeroNabs widely available as an inexpensive, over-the-counter medication to prevent and treat COVID-19.

“Far more effective than wearable forms of personal protective equipment, we think of AeroNabs as a molecular form of PPE that could serve as an important stopgap until vaccines provide a more permanent solution to COVID-19,” said AeroNabs co-inventor Peter Walter, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. For those who cannot access or don’t respond to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, Walter added, AeroNabs could be a more permanent line of defense against COVID-19.

“We assembled an incredible group of talented biochemists, cell biologists, virologists and structural biologists to get the project from start to finish in only a few months,” said Schoof, a member of the Walter lab and an AeroNabs co-inventor.

A Miami hospital will be the first in the country to test a possible COVID-19 treatment on humans this August.

The research center at Westchester General Hospital in Coral Terrace is on its way to enroll patients to test Ifenprodil, a pill developed in the 1970s to treat blood circulation disorders that may alleviate some COVID-19 side-effects in the lungs.

The drug, which was tested on a coronavirus patient overseas for the first time Wednesday, may reduce the severity and duration of COVID-19 infections, according to Algernon Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian drug repurposing company that investigates pre-approved drugs for new disease applications and is now leading Ifenprodil’s COVID-19 testing.

“Just looking at the results of the research, it’s astonishing,” said Mark Williams, Algernon’s medical director. “Our drug might have a good chance at modulating the disease and hopefully reducing much of the damage that can occur in the lungs.”

Algernon will be testing the drug on 150 patients worldwide. Locations include Australia, Romania, the Philippines and the United States — with at least two locations in South Florida. Westchester General was the first site to be activated and will be investing $20,000 to $25,000 in the testing process, according to Williams.

Ifenprodil could treat a lung disease called Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, a “scarring or thickening of the lung tissue” that researchers fear is causing some COVID-19 deaths and could continue to threaten the lives of recovered patients after they leave the hospital, according to Algernon’s CEO, Christopher Moreau.

“It’s a very challenging condition to have because the average lifespan from the time of the diagnosis is about three years. And the tissue in the lungs starts to thicken and, as the disease progresses, there’s less and less oxygen in the blood,” Moreau explained.

There are two other drugs currently being considered to treat this specific coronavirus-induced disease: Pirfenidone, approved in the United States in 2014, and Nintedanib, approved in 2016. But Moreau and Williams believe that Ifenprodil could be a more effective treatment for COVID-19.

“Our drug works with a very different mechanism than [those of] other companies,” said Williams. “We’re helping boost and protect the patient instead of going after the disease.”

Ifenprodil’s breakthrough
Algernon announced on March 6 that it was going to look into the drug as a possible treatment for COVID-19 after discovering a promising independent research study conducted in China, Moreau said.

The study showed that the drug was able to reduce mortality by 40 percent in people affected by the world’s most lethal avian flu, the Asian Avian Influenza A — a rare disease that was first detected in humans in 1997 in Hong Kong and reemerged in Canada in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Seeing some promise in Ifenprodil, Algernon began conducting its own studies to see its effects on the lungs. And the results, Moreau said, were incredible.

“We did an animal study where we went up against the Merck drug Gefapixant — which is what’s mainly used now to treat chronic cough — and our drug outperformed Merck’s by 110 percent,” he said.

But the breakthrough came with a third study released on June 1 by the University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for Advanced Pain Studies, where researchers discovered that Ifenprodil is made up of a unique compound that could stop COVID-19 from killing lung cells.

Therapeutic treatment vs. vaccines
Moreau suggested that Ifenprofil could be safer than a rushed vaccine and may be released to the public sooner.

“We definitely need to be working on a vaccine, but there’s a great risk [in rushing] the development process because of what it could mean if it goes wrong,” he said.

Moreau compared the race to develop COVID-19 treatments to the one that started in the 1980s for HIV, for which a vaccine has still not been approved.

“They’ve been working on a vaccine for 25 years and haven’t found one yet, but they do have a number of therapeutic options, drug choices, that sort of form a cocktail,” he said. “So for COVID-19, we need to look at those options too. They may just be the global fix.”

Colchicine is an approved drug used in the prevention and treatment of gout attacks, caused by too much uric acid in the blood.
Higavi said they have completed testing colchicine on mice and found that it successfully inhibited the release of alpha defensin. Now, they are waiting for the necessary approvals to test it on human coronavirus patients.

Researchers in England said they have the first evidence that a drug can improve COVID-19 survival: A cheap, widely available steroid called dexamethasone reduced deaths by up to one third in severely ill hospitalized patients.

Results were announced Tuesday, and researchers said they would publish them soon. The study is a large, strict test that randomly assigned 2,104 patients to get the drug and compared them with 4,321 patients getting usual care.

The drug was given either orally or through an IV. After 28 days, it had reduced deaths by 35% in patients who needed treatment with breathing machines and by 20% in those needing only supplemental oxygen. It did not appear to help less ill patients.

“This is an extremely welcome result,” one study leader, Peter Horby of the University of Oxford, said in a statement. "The survival benefit is clear and large in those patients who are sick enough to require oxygen treatment, so dexamethasone should now become standard of care in these patients. Dexamethasone is inexpensive, on the shelf and can be used immediately to save lives worldwide.”


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Even though the drug helps only in severe cases, “countless lives will be saved globally,” said Nick Cammack of Wellcome, a British charity that supports science research.

“Dexamethasone must now be rolled out and accessed by thousands of critically ill patients around the world," said Cammack, who had no role in the study. "It is highly affordable, easy to make, can be scaled up quickly and only needs a small dosage."


Steroid drugs reduce inflammation, which sometimes develops in COVID-19 patients as the immune system overreacts to fight the infection. This overreaction can prove fatal, so doctors have been testing steroids and other anti-inflammatory drugs in such patients. The World Health Organization advises against using steroids earlier in the course of illness because they can slow the time until patients clear the virus.

Researchers estimated that the drug would prevent one death for every eight patients treated while on breathing machines and one for every 25 patients on extra oxygen alone.


This is the same study that this month showed the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was not working against the coronavirus. The study enrolled more than 11,000 patients in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who were given either standard of care or that plus one of several treatments: dexamethasone; the HIV combo drug lopinavir-ritonavir, the antibiotic azithromycin; the anti-inflammatory drug tocilizumab; or plasma from people who have recovered from COVID-19 that contains antibodies to fight the virus.

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Research continues on the other treatments. The research is funded by government health agencies in the United Kingdom and private donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Contributing: Maria Cheng from London

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Hydroxychloroquine:FDA pulls emergency use of malaria drug touted by Trump to treat the coronavirus

This is the remedy known as Avifavir , produced on the basis of the experimental antiviral substance Favipiravir, which has already shown its effectiveness against other viruses such as influenza, yellow fever or West Nile. Avifavir has been shown in several clinical trials to block the reproduction mechanisms of the coronavirus.