Report: COVID-19 patients are responding quickly to experimental drug remdesivir

A vial of remdesivir.
(Image credit: Gilead Sciences via AP)

In Chicago, COVID-19 coronavirus patients participating in a clinical study of the antiviral medicine remdesivir are experiencing quick recoveries from their respiratory and fever symptoms, Stat News reported Thursday.

Remdesivir was developed by Gilead Sciences to treat Ebola. The company is conducting two global studies — the severe COVID-19 study includes 2,400 patients at 152 trial sites, and the moderate COVID-19 study has 1,600 patients at 169 sites. The trials are investigating five- and 10-day treatment courses of remdesivir, and aim to have a statistical comparison of improvement between them.

University of Chicago Medicine is one of the hospitals participating, with 125 COVID-19 patients — 113 of them with severe symptoms — taking part in two Phase 3 clinical trials, receiving daily infusions of remdesivir. Stat has obtained video of Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago's infectious disease specialist who is overseeing the studies, sharing with her colleagues updates on the trials, including how nearly all of the patients have been discharged in less than a week.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Only two patients have died, she said, and when the drug is started, "we see fever curves falling." Mullane also shared that people have "come off ventilators a day after starting therapy. So, in that realm, overall our patients have done very well." Most patients leave the hospital after six days, she added, "so that tells us duration of therapy doesn't have to be 10 days. We have very few that went out to 10 days, maybe three."

The hospital's trials do not include a placebo group, and Stat notes that it is "impossible to determine the full study results with any certainty. Still, no other clinical data from the Gilead studies have been released to date, and excitement is high." Read more at Stat News.

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.