In exciting news, the official report of the ACTT trial for Remdesivir was published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week (Beigel JH, et al.). In the study, we saw an expansion of the previously released preliminary results with stronger significance for the efficacy of Remdesivir on reducing time to recovery in a subset of hospitalized patients (those who require oxygen and ongoing care, but no ventilation). It is interesting that patients in the ICU did not respond well to the therapy, potentially due to close timing of therapy in relation to peak viral load. Although this …
The potential for corticosteroid treatment in COVID-19?
Following the preliminary results from COVID-19 trials in the previous weeks, ongoing trials are continuing to be revamped and redesigned. So while we wait for additional news, this week’s blog post is going to focus on the debate of corticosteroids as a COVID-19 treatment. Corticosteroids are used for a variety of conditions such as asthma, rheumatological and neurological conditions, and allergies. Steroids are known to have anti-inflammatory, immunosuppressive, and vasoconstrictive effects. At this time however, there is conflicting information on the success of steroid treatment in …
New NIH Trial Announcements and another Hydroxychloroquine fails to find a beneficial effect in COVID-19
Several surprising announcements were made this past week pertaining to COVID-19 clinical trials. The first was the ending of the first phase of the NIAID ACTT trial of remdesivir. Although remdesivir did reduce recovery time from COVID-19 it did not demonstrate a significantly better mortality rate; thus, NIAID has begun the next phase of ACTT, respectively called ACTT2, which is a joint trial of remdesivir and baricinib, an anti-inflammatory inhibitor of JAK1 and JAK2. This week another study has also been released evaluating hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 mild and moderate cases (Tang …