Clinical trials for a COVID-19 treatment are starting at Northwestern Medicine, which is testing an Ebola drug for safety and efficacy. | Stock photo
Clinical trials for a COVID-19 treatment are starting at Northwestern Medicine, which is testing an Ebola drug for safety and efficacy. | Stock photo
Northwestern Medicine in Chicago has developed a trial drug for the coronavirus and is enrolling participants for clinical trials.
Remdesivir, a drug developed for Ebola, is being tested by Northwestern Medicine to determine if it's effective against COVID-19. When tested in animals, the drug showed to have antiviral activity against the coronavirus, according to a press release from Northwestern Medicine.
The first participant in the trials, an 89-year-old man in intensive care who was diagnosed with the virus, received the drug in the Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to Northwestern Medicine.
“I think it’s fantastic this trial is off the ground,” Dr. Babafemi Taiwo, chief of infectious diseases at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Medicine, told Northwestern Medicine. “It puts something in our hands that we can investigate in a rigorous fashion in the quest for therapies that may be effective and widely adopted to treat the pandemic.“
The testing will be a double-blind and randomized placebo-controlled trial, according to Clinical Trials.gov. It's designed to test how safe and efficient the drug is in participants diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Two drugs, Remdesivir or a placebo drug, are randomly distributed to 440 trial participants, who will take the drug once a day for up to 10 days, according to Clinical Trials. If a patient recovers in less than 10 days, treatment will be stopped.
"It’s too early to say if there is an effect because some of them are still receiving the treatment,” Taiwo told Northwestern Medicine.
After treatment, participants will continue to be evaluated for 30 days, Northwestern Medicine reported.
The study is set to take place over the course of three years, but results could be ready in a shorter amount of time, according to Northwestern Medicine.
"I think we'll get our results soon because the enrollment pace is very quick," Taiwo told Northwestern Medicine. "I hope that in a matter of months, we'll be able to tell wheter this therapy is effective or not."
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/Division of Microbiology and Diseases of the National Institutes of Health is sponsoring the clinical trials.
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