The Covid-19 pill shows promise in preliminary testing

An additional study of the experimental antiviral is underway. If it is shown to be able to treat people with Covid-19 who have symptoms, the drug would strengthen a limited arsenal of treatments and would be the first oral antiviral against the disease.

In addition to a year of the pandemic, doctors and patients with Covid-19 have few options. Only one antiviral has been authorized: Gildes Sciences remdesivir Inc.

, and has been shown to provide only a modest benefit in hospitalized patients, reducing stays by several days.

Some infectious disease experts claim that the experimental drug, called molnupiravir, could play an important role in helping also sick people but who are still at home and play the same role as Tamiflu for the flu.

“It’s fascinating and interesting, but it’s not exactly 100% complete,” said Carl Dieffenbach, director of the AIDS Division at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who did not participate in the study. “What we need to confirm is that there are clinical benefits.”

Drug researchers are making a push to find new Covid-19 drugs to improve the performance of the few therapies currently available and fill the supply gaps. They are also looking for therapies that are effective against the new variants of coronavirus that are spreading rapidly.

“The clear need for this is the development of potent antivirals that act directly against SARS-CoV-2,” Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID and chief medical adviser to President Biden, said in a recent White House report. , referring to the virus causing the pandemic.

Unlike other medicines aimed at the spike protein that protrudes from the surface of the virus, molnupiravir attacks a part of the virus that helps it reproduce.

The mid-phase trial of 182 subjects, or phase 2, studied the effect of several doses of molnupiravir in people who had developed symptoms of Covid-19 during the previous week, tested positive for the disease during the last four weeks. days and were not hospitalized.

The tests found no infectious viruses in any of the study volunteers who took molnupiravir twice a day after five days of treatment, while 24% of subjects who received a placebo did so, Ridgeback told the Virtual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

Subjects who took higher doses of the drug also had lower levels of infectious virus than the placebo group after three days.

Ridgeback Biotherapeutics co-founder Wayne Holman said the results indicate the drug prevents the new coronavirus from reproducing in the body and offers the first evidence that an oral antiviral drug can be effective against the virus.

The findings also suggest, but do not prove, that the drug can reduce the disease, said Dr. Holman, who is also the chief executive of Ridgeback Capital, an investment firm. Ridgeback Biotherapeutics has an approved treatment for Ebola.

Merck said it may have provisional results later this month from two final-phase trials exploring whether molnupiravir helps prevent hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19.