[ad_1]
“What happened to these patients? Did they die from anaphylaxis? Did they get well, sign out against medical advice, and go party? This is unknown — but I’m worried that these patients actually didn’t fare so well,” Farkas writes.
Farkas, like Evans and Griffin, concludes that the data are largely unusable. “Until [a randomized controlled trial] is performed, further compassionate use of remdesivir probably isn’t justified,” he writes.
Data from Compassionate Use Program
The data in the NEJM article come from a compassionate use program set up by Gilead. The company says it has provided emergency access to remdesivir for several hundred patients in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
The authors, led by Jonathan Grein, MD, from Cedars–Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California, report on 61 patients who received remdesivir as part of this program.
The authors, several of whom are employees of Gilead, note that data on 8 patients could not be analyzed (including 7 patients with no posttreatment data and 1 with a dosing error).
Of the 53 patients whose data were included, 22 were in the United States, 22 in Europe or Canada, and 9 in Japan.
These were patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who had confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and had an oxygen saturation of 94% or less while they were breathing ambient air, or who were receiving oxygen support.
Patients received a 10-day course of remdesivir, consisting of 200 mg administered intravenously on day 1, followed by 100 mg daily for the remaining 9 days of treatment. At baseline, 30 patients (57%) were receiving mechanical ventilation and 4 (8%) were receiving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.
During a median follow-up of 18 days, 36 patients (68%) had an improvement in oxygen-support class, including 17 (57%) of 30 patients receiving mechanical ventilation who were extubated.
A total of 25 patients (47%) were discharged, and 7 patients (13%) died; mortality was 18% (6 of 34) among patients receiving invasive ventilation and 5% (1 of 19) among those not receiving invasive ventilation
While the authors acknowledge limitations of the data they collected, they nevertheless comment that “comparisons with contemporaneous cohorts from the literature, in whom general care is expected to be consistent with that of our cohort, suggest that remdesivir may have clinical benefit in patients with severe COVID-19.”
