Clinical trials of anti-COVID-19 drug reveal life-saving effects

With a vaccine still a long distance away, efforts to repurpose old medications used for other ailments provide hope of an early counter to COVID-19, say, scientists, placing the antiviral remdesivir on top of the list of possible contenders.

As COVID-19 continues its spread — crossing 5.2 million cases and 3,38,000 fatalities on Saturday — several categories of drugs are under clinical trial. Of them, remdesivir, which initially went into trials for treating the deadly Ebola virus five years ago, has shown promise by modestly speeding recovery from COVID-19, Firstpost.com reports, citing the findings.

More than 130 drugs are under experimentation to treat COVID-19, some may have the potential to stop the virus while others may help calm overactive immune responses that damage organs, according to a tracker maintained by the Milken Institute, an independent economic think tank in the US,

"Right now, there is only one effective approach which is to repurpose already approved drugs for other diseases if they can be used for COVID-19. One example is remdesivir," Ram Vishwakarma, director of the Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, CSIR, Jammu, told PTI.

Remdesivir is helping people recover faster, and is lowering the death rate among critically ill patients, Vishwakarma said, adding that it can be life-saving.

We do not have time to develop new drugs. New drug development takes five-10 years so we are using existing drugs and conducting clinical trials to find if any of them are effective, Vishwakarma said.

Some molecules available for treating diseases like HIV or other viral infections can be quickly checked against the novel coronavirus, he explained. If found effective, they can be used against COVID-19 with the appropriate approval from drug control bodies.