With the deaths and new continuing unabated and world leaders urging the people to live with coronavirus for ever, the only hope left is the discovery of vaccine.
Let’s just cling on to the hopes. Because, there is still positive news coming about the ongoing attempts for a vaccine. A report has said that at least 21 ongoing clinical trials have reported interim results and 16 of them are positive.
GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company which has done the study, says that the majority of these trials started this year after the virus hit the world. These trials have an estimated end date between April 2020 and March 2021 that will provide more data on the efficacy of the treatments for COVID-19.
Sotty Chung-Siu, Senior Analyst of MPH at GlobalData, comments: “These clinical trials are in phases, with 69% of them in early stage trials (Phase I to Phase II). Majority of them are investigating different drugs, either alone or combination treatments, with one using a secondary intervention. The four multinational clinical trials that are planning to enroll the most subjects are investigating remdesivir, sarilumab and bevacizumab. One of the drugs that recently had positive clinical trials results is remdesivir.”
Chung-Siu continues: “The results from a Phase III ongoing trial by Gilead evaluating the safety and efficacy of remdesivir in patients with severe COVID-19 were announced on 29 April 2020. Remdesivir demonstrated similar clinical improvement in patients receiving a 10-day treatment to those receiving a five-day treatment.
“In addition, more than half of the patients were discharged by Day 14 in both treatment groups while also achieving clinical recovery. Lastly, the drug candidate was well tolerated in both subject groups. A second clinical trial using remdesivir reported preliminary results on 29 April 2020. The trial reported a 31% faster recovery time over those who received placebo. In addition, the recovery time was 11 days for patients who were treated with remdesivir, compared to 15 days for placebo.”
The report also said that all drugs did not give positive results. Hydroxychloroquine has recently failed to meet endpoints and saw adverse events in a retrospective study. Moreover, the patients treated with hydroxychloroquine had a higher mortality rate. Nonetheless, the number of clinical trials investigating hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as a primary or secondary drug continues to expand.
