COVID-19 Treatments

Over the past two weeks, the AstraZeneca/Oxford AZD1222 phase III vaccine trials have had a bumpy road. The phase III trials were temporarily halted after a participant developed neurological symptoms and was later diagnosed with transverse myelitis. This is the second temporary halt of AZD1222 trials, after a similar incidence with a participant having neurological…

Last week, there were several interesting updates on the front of COVID-19 clinical trials. The first one is a statement released by the NIH which expresses disapproval of the recent emergency use authorization (EUA) granted by the Food and Drug Administration for convalescent plasma. The NIH raised concerns about the lack of data, particularly from…

The FDA has now given an emergency use authorization (EUA) to the use of convalescent plasma in treating severe COVID-19. Convalescent plasma contains antibodies from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 and is a common therapy tested in any novel infection. However, convalescent plasma has many limitations that monoclonal antibodies seek to solve (check out…

In the dire face of the COVID-19 pandemic, many biotech companies took flight and immediately went into development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Over time some of these companies have moved faster through clinical trials and have secured government sponsorships to help bring the vaccines faster to market. As a result, the US currently has several vaccines…

This week I wanted to discuss the exciting and quickly evolving landscape of SARS-CoV-2 antibody trials for treating COVID-19. As always, this information is constantly changing and reflects the status of trials at the timing of writing. Antibody therapy is an extremely promising horizon in the COVID-19 pandemic. By supplementing patients with antibodies specific to…

In the past week the NIH has announced a number of new COVID-19 clinical trials. The first trial is ACTT-3. This trial builds upon the first Remdesivir trial (ACTT-1) and will test the combination of Remdesivir with Interferon-beta-1a which has pleiotropic effects on the immune system. In addition, two antibody trials, ACTIV-2 and ACTIV-3, were…

This past week a lot of exciting announcements came from trials testing novel therapies for COVID-19. First, in a recent press release, Synairgen reported on their interferon beta-1b phase II trial (n=220, 120 out patients and 100 in patients) in which patients on interferon beta therapy were more than twice as likely to recover (p=0.043)…

This week the SOLIDARITY trial published their official report on Dexamethasone as a therapy for hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the New England Journal of Medicine (Horby P, et al., NEJM, 2020). This report was previously summarized in a press release prior to publication and as a pre-print on medRxiv with a smaller number of participants…

This week, the United Kingdom’s RECOVERY trial had a press release on the preliminary findings on the antiviral combo therapy of lopinavir and ritonavir, which is commonly used to treat HIV. They reported no significant benefit (p=0.58) from the therapy with a high 28 day mortality for both the treatment (22.1%) and the usual care…