Scientists around the world are racing to find novel ways to treat, mitigate or prevent infection from the novel coronavirus. Here are the latest developments.
Scientists around the world are racing to find novel ways to treat, mitigate or prevent infection from the novel coronavirus.
The response has been especially rapid as the virus has spread unchecked across the globe. Still, any treatments are a long way from being proven both effective and safe, and most certainly won’t come in time to address the current pandemic.
According to some of the top infectious disease experts in the world, even on an accelerated timeline, a vaccine is still likely 12 to 18 months away — and then the challenge will be producing enough to make it readily available.
There is currently no drug therapy or vaccine widely approved anywhere in the world for COVID-19.
Here are the latest developments in the research.
Old drugs, new tricks
May 21: Nova Scotia-based Appili Therapeutics announces that Health Canada has greenlit its Phase 2 study to evaluate the Japanese flu drug favipiravir as a preventative measure against COVID-19 outbreaks. The study participants will be residents and staff at 16 long-term care homes in Ontario.
May 7: Japan becomes the first country to approve the use of Gilead Sciences Inc.’s remdesivir to treat patients with severe COVID-19, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted the drug an Emergency Use Authorization, a limited type of approval to make a treatment available during public health emergencies.
May 1: Health Canada announces it has authorized the CONCOR-1 clinical study that will involve soliciting donations of blood plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients across the country to see if their antibodies can help treat people who are sick.
April 15: Japan’s Fujifilm announces it is ramping up production of Avigan (favipiravir), a drug approved in 2014 to treat influenza that doesn’t respond to other drugs. It’s produced and distributed at the discretion of the Japanese government and has never been commercially available anywhere in the world. The drug is in Phase 3 clinical trials in Japan, and in other trials in the U.S., Italy and China.
April 9: The University of British Columbia announces that patient enrolment is underway for the Canadian arm of the World Health Organization’s global SOLIDARITY trial, called CATCO (Canadian Trials for COVID). Patients requiring hospitalization for COVID-19 at one of 20 participating hospitals in Canada will be eligible for the trial, which will start by evaluating lopinavir-ritonavir, a combination of antiviral drugs used to treat HIV, compared with “optimized supportive care.” It will later add two other medications for investigation — the antiviral remdesivir and chloroquine, which is used to treat malaria.
April 3: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces an “expanded access” program to facilitate wider study of convalescent plasma — that is, injecting the antibody-rich blood plasma of patients who have recovered into patients who are sick — as a potential treatment for COVID-19 patients. The Mayo Clinic is named lead site to co-ordinate the program among dozens of doctors and scientists who initially self-organized to conduct such research.
April 2: Canadian Blood Services (CBS) says it is working with researchers to design a large, national clinical trial on treating the novel coronavirus with convalescent plasma, which CBS and Héma-Québec will be responsible for collecting and supplying to hospitals across the country.
WATCH | Dr. Dana Devine explains how ‘convalescent plasma’ will be collected and used:
“We think it’s most likely to be effective is when you have a patient who is clearly sick with the virus but whose own immune system hasn’t had a chance to make antibodies yet,” CBS chief scientist Dr. Dana Devine told CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks.
Convalescent plasma has been used in a small number of COVID-19 patients since the pandemic began, but not in a study comparing those who receive the therapy with those who don’t.
March 26: Researchers at the University of Manitoba, in conjunction with researchers at the University of Minnesota, University of Alberta and McGill University Health Centre, begin recruiting participants for a series of trials to test whether the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine can reduce the symptoms and severity of COVID-19 and slow its spread.
Long-term use of hydroxychloroquine is known to cause cardiac and eye toxicity, but Dr. Ryan Zarychanski, an associate professor of internal medicine, said the short, five-day trial should be “very safe.”
Experts, including Canada’s chief public health officer, warn that hydroxychloroquine can have serious side-effects. They also say there is a danger that hoarding the medication could hurt the many patients who take it for chronic inflammatory diseases, like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
March 25: New York’s Mount Sinai hospital begins treating critically ill COVID-19 patients via plasmapheresis, a century-old therapy that involves removing antibody-rich plasma from blood