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What your doctor is reading on Medscape.com:
APRIL 29, 2020 — Hospitalized patients who had advanced COVID-19 with lung involvement and who received the antiviral agent remdesivir (Gilead Sciences) recovered faster than similar patients who received placebo, according to a preliminary data analysis from a US-led randomized, controlled trial.
On the basis of as yet unpublished data, remdesivir “will be the standard of care” for patients with COVID-19, said Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), during a press conference at the White House today.
The randomized, placebo-controlled international trial was sponsored by NIAID, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, and enrolled 1063 patients. It began on February 21.
The interim results, discussed in the press conference and in a NIAID press release, show that time to recovery (ie, being well enough for hospital discharge or to return to normal activity level) was 31% faster for patients who received remdesivir than for those who received placebo (P < .001).
The median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir, compared with 15 days for those who received placebo. Results also suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8.0% for the group receiving remdesivir and 11.6% for the patients who received placebo (P = .059).
The study, known as the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT), is the first clinical trial launched in the United States to evaluate an experimental treatment for COVID-19. It is being conducted at 68 sites ― 47 in the United States and 21 in countries in Europe and Asia.
The data are being released after an interim review by the independent data safety monitoring board found significant benefit with the drug, Fauci said.
“The reason we are making the announcement now is something that people don’t fully appreciate: Whenever you have clear-cut evidence that a drug works, you have an ethical obligation to let the people in the placebo group know so they could have access,” he explained.
“When I was looking at the data with our team the other night, it was reminiscent of 34 years ago in 1986 when we were struggling for drugs for HIV,” said Fauci, who was a key figure in HIV/AIDS research. “We did the first randomized, placebo-controlled trial with AZT. It turned out to have an effect that was modest but that was not the endgame because, building on that, every year after, we did better and better.”
