The World Health Organization (WHO) have launched SOLIDARITY, a giant trial, testing the potential of therapies, old and new, to beat the coronavirus that is causing the current pandemic.
In a press briefing last Friday, WHO director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced the launch of SOLIDARITY, a giant multinational trial for testing therapies that researchers have suggested may be effective against COVID-19.
“That’s why WHO [have] launched the SOLIDARITY trial, to generate robust, high quality evidence as fast as possible,” Dr. Ghebreyesus said.
“I’m glad that many countries have joined the SOLIDARITY trial that will help us to move with speed and volume. The more countries that sign up to the SOLIDARITY trial and other large studies, the faster we will get results on which drugs work, and the more lives we will be able to save.”
– Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
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SOLIDARITY includes research looking at four possible therapeutics: remdesivir; chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine; lopinavir plus ritonavir; and lopinavir plus ritonavir and interferon-beta.
Scientists originally developed remdesivir as a drug to treat Ebola. However, clinical trials later indicated that the compound was insufficiently effective against the virus that causes that disease.
The drug relies on a mechanism that appears to be effective against other viruses, specifically coronaviruses, however.
Research, appearing in Science Translational Medicine in 2017, suggested that remdesivir may be able to fight SARS and MERS.
So, more recently, investigators have started experimenting with the drug to fight SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
In one case study from earlier this month, doctors reported that a 35-year-old male from the United States, who received remdesivir after contracting the new coronavirus, started to recover soon after he began the drug. There have since been other reports of people recovering from COVID-19 thanks to this drug.
Remdesivir works by inhibiting a specific enzyme, RNA polymerase, which normally allows the virus to replicate. Without that enzyme, the virus becomes less able to maintain its hold on the body.
Commenting on a preliminary in vitro study, suggesting that remdesivir may be effective against SARS-CoV-2, Dr. Andrew Preston, from the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, explains that the drug “mimics one of the building blocks of the viral genome, but is nonfunctional, causing premature termination of virus genome replication.”
Doctors have used chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as antimalarial drugs for decades, but researchers have recently started arguing that they could repurpose these compounds to fight SARS-CoV-2.
A WHO report from March 13 indicates that “chloroquine has received significant attention in [different] countries as a potentially useful prophylactic [preventive] and curative agent, prompting the need to examine emerging evidence to inform a decision on its potential role.”
The report weighed the results of different preliminary studies that tested the potential of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19, and it paved the way for larger trials due to verify the effectiveness of these drugs against the new disease.
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