This is (perhaps) a first step towards a treatment against the Covid-19 coronavirus. This Friday, May 1, 2020, the US Drug Agency (FDA) gave its "emergency" green light for the use of remdesivir in the fight against the coronavirus Sars-Cov-2.
Remdesivir is also being tested as part of the European Discovery clinical trial.
What exactly is remdesivir? This antiviral drug developed in 2015 by Gilead Laboratories (and named GS-5734 in medical language) has already proven its effectiveness against two viruses of the Coronaviridae family: MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-1. Remesivir works by directly "bypassing" the structure of the virus and preventing it from replicating in the body - it is called a "nucleotide analogue".
This Wednesday, April 29, 2020, at the end of a large clinical trial conducted since February 2020 on 1063 patients in the United States, Europe and Asia, the American Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that "remdesivir has a clear, significant and positive effect in reducing the recovery time" of patients suffering from Covid-19.
In detail, US researchers found that patients' recovery time was shortened by an average of 31% (or about 4 days) when treated with remdesivir. The mortality rate was about 3% lower.
REMDESIVIR REDUCES PATIENT RECOVERY TIME AND MORTALITY OF COVID-19
However, the drug is controversial: indeed, a study conducted in Wuhan (China) and published in the medical journal The Lancet has found no effectiveness in reducing the risk of cancer....
Remdesivir: what now? FDA approval allows remdesivir to be used by hospitals for serious Covid-19 patients who need oxygen, for example under artificial respiration.
Gilead Laboratories has already announced the distribution of 1.5 million doses of the drug: these will be sent as a priority to hospitals in the cities most affected by the epidemic in the United States. Remdesivir will be administered intravenously to patients for 5 days.
The United States is paying a heavy price for the coronavirus epidemic currently raging around the world: this Friday, 1800 deaths in the space of 24 hours have been recorded and 65,000 Americans have already died from Covid-19 disease.
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