Common heartburn medicine being tested on COVID-19 patients in New York

A generic heartburn medicine is being tested on COVID-19 patients at Northwell Health hospitals in the New York City area, but don't rush to the drugstore, Dr. Kevin Tracey, the head of Northwell's Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, told CNN on Sunday. The 187 patients in the trial are either getting massive doses of famotidine, the active ingredient in Pepcid, or a saline placebo solution, and the first results won't be released for at least a few weeks. The trial started March 13, but it was kept under wraps in part to prevent a run on famotidine.

There is no real evidence that famotidine is effective at treating COVID-19, but the hope is that the drug could prevent the coronavirus from replicating by essentially preoccupying it, similar to how protease inhibitors stop HIV. Tracey said he got the idea to test the heartburn medicine from a colleague, Dr. Michael Callahan, who observed improvement among COVID-19 patients in China who were taking famotidine rather than a more expensive medicine to treat their heartburn. Famotidine was also near the top of a computer model's ranking of existing drugs that might work against the coronavirus, based on its genome.

If the drug proves effective, "it's generic, it's plentiful, and it's inexpensive," Tracey told CNN. But until then, "we have to remain skeptical," Dr. Carlos Del Rio at Emory University told ABC News. "In the early years of HIV, we tried a lot of stuff and we thought, 'Oh this is going to work' and nothing worked." That also appears to be the case with the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which all the Northwell test subjects are also taking, for now. Famotidine, at least, appears to be safe, said Dr. Stuart Ray at Johns Hopkins. "I think this sort of off-label repurposing is sensible with drugs for which we have a long safety record," he told ABC News. "And we really need a win."

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