Remdesivir gaining momentum as potential treatment for COVID-19 after promising US study

Listed as one of the most promising treatments in the World Health Organization's Solidarity trial, remdesivir is produced by US pharmaceutical company Gilead and was originally tested as a treatment for the Ebola virus. The drug has shown some promising results in animal tests for MERS and SARS, which, similarly to COVID-19, are caused by coronaviruses.

On Wednesday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the United States' National Institutes of Health, published results of its study of remdesivir, which involved 1,063 COVID-19 patients. The randomized, controlled clinical trial found that patients who received remdesivir recovered faster than those who received placebo — 11 days compared to 15 days, respectively. The mortality rate was also lower for the group receiving remdesivir.

The same day, however, medical journal The Lancet published a study by Chinese researchers, which involved over 200 patients in Wuhan hospitals. It described remdesivir as "not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits". The study was stopped early due to difficulties in recruiting patients.

PROMISING FINDINGS

"Yes, the findings in the NIAID study are promising, as far as I can tell from a press release. But note that they are relatively modest: time to recovery dropped from 15 to 11 days and the percentage of patients who died dropped from 11.6 percent to 8 percent," George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California-San Francisco, told Sputnik.

He noted that even though the death rate did not drop significantly, "these are modest but important effects."

The Chinese clinical trial was randomized, placebo-controlled and double-blind — it means that neither participants nor researchers knew who was receiving the treatment — thus, meeting the so-called golden standard for such studies.

Yet, the study by researchers in China had "several issues", namely administration of the drug in combination with other therapeutics, which could have affected the assessment of remdesivir's effects, according to Rutherford.

"The Chinese study had several issues. The most prominent was the concomitant use of other therapeutics that may have had an effect for better or worse," he said.
Yet, according to Rutherford, remdesivir may become a part of broader therapeutic treatment of COVID-19 and more studies of its efficiency in combination with other drugs will likely follow.

"Think of it not as definitive therapy but as a building block. The next trial will be remdesivir plus some other drug vs. remdesivir alone," the epidemiologist said.

The WHO chose not to comment on the two conflicting studies, but expressed hope that this or other drugs would be helpful in treating the disease.