SAN ANTONIO — As of now, only one drug, remdesivir, has been granted emergency use by the FDA to help treat COVID-19 patients.
A collaboration between UT Health San Antonio and University Health System opened the door and allowed them to participate in the early phases of a massive clinical trial of the drug moving at warp speed to try and combat the virus, and cut down the number of deaths.
"It's been great to see everybody work together on trying to find an agent that will have some promise for treating patients with COVID-19 disease," said Jason Bowling, an infectious disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at University Health System.
"Remdesivir is an antiviral drug, so it attacks the virus," added Thomas Patterson, who heads up the Division of Infectious Diseases at UT Health San Antonio. "It basically prohibits the virus from replicating and then spreading in the body."
Twenty San Antonio patients were asked to participate in the trial that was taking place in 75 centers around the world—every one of them said yes.
"These are all hospitalized patients," Patteron said. "As the study goes, there are those that we call mild and mild to moderate disease or mild to severe disease."
The worldwide trial included 1,063 patients in all. Preliminary showed those who received the antiviral drug had a 31% faster recovery time of 11 days, compared to those who received the placebo, who had a recovery time of 15 days (recovery, in this case, means they were well enough to be discharged from the hospital or return to normal activities).
The death rate for patients who were given the drug was also lower at 8%, compared to 11.6% for those on the placebo.
"Now that we know that the first phase with drug and placebo showed that drug (was) effective, we are able to drop that placebo arm and then we can add other therapies to that drug," Patterson said.
Next comes phase two of the trial, in which remdesivir will be used in conjunction with an anti-inflammatory drug, baricitinib, to see if effectiveness can further improve.