The answer to finding a cure to COVID-19 may be near. According to STAT REPORTS, a Chicago hospital using antiviral medicine from Gilead Science called Remdesivir has seen rapid recoveries in patients during their clinical trials. In the report, nearly all patients being treated were released in less than a week.
Gilead Sciences' Remdesivir was one of the first drugs identified in lab tests to have the potential to cure SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease. Remdesivir is a general antiviral drug that researchers have been studying in conjunction with an array of viruses to see how it would react.
Gilead Science's labs discovered that the drug has the potential to cure other coronaviruses such as MERS and SARS. Therefore the prospects for it addressing COVID-19 are positive.
Gilead's researchers and scientists focused on Remdesivir through five COVID-19 clinical trials. It was also tested in the first COVID-19 case recorded in the United States. Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization (WHO) said that Remdesivir is currently the only drug which has the efficacy to cure the coronavirus.
"Drug discovery and development is usually a very long and tedious process and you could have many failures on the path to an approved product," said Tomas Cihlar, the vice president of virology of Gilead Science, in an interview with STAT.
"It would be wonderful if it works. But it needs to be proven," he added.
Remdesivir shows positive results with coronavirus patients: Is this the cure we are looking for?
According to STAT REPORTS, the University of Chicago Medicine gathered 125 people infected by coronavirus to be treated in Gilead's two Phase-3 clinical tests.
One hundred thirteen patients showed severe symptoms of the disease and all of them underwent treatment using Remdesivir. Kathleen Mullane, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Chicago, said that most of the patients were already cured and discharged, but with two individuals succumbing to the disease. According to Mullane, this was the best news they received about the trials of Remdesivir.
However, she clarified that these results only provide a snapshot of the drug's efficacy. It is still impossible to determine the full results of the study with any certainty, although the same trials are being done by other medical institutions.
Currently, there is still no other available clinical data provided by Gilead Science to show that Remdesivir can effectively cure coronavirus infections. Further research needs to be done to be completely certain.
"What we can say at this stage is that we look forward to data from ongoing studies becoming available," she said in an interview with STAT on Thursday, April 16.
Gilead's trials include 2,400 patients gathered from 152 different clinical trials across the globe while its moderate COVID-19 tests are treating 1,600 infected individuals from 169 different medical centers.
