RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The drug Remdesivir, used against Ebola, is among the most studied to fight the symptoms caused by the novel coronavirus, as well as Chloroquine. Now, a study conducted by the University of Chicago and released by the Stat medical website, shows that Remdesivir helps in the recovery of patients who have developed the Covid-19 disease.
The treatment accelerates recovery from fever and respiratory symptoms, which has led to patients who took part in the study being released from the hospital in less than a week.
“The best news is that most of our patients have been discharged, which is great. Only two patients died,” said Kathleen Mullane, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Chicago who oversees the Remdesivir studies. “Most of our patients are severe and they are discharged within six days, which means the therapy doesn’t need to take ten days. We have very few who took it for ten days, maybe three,” she said.
However, the University of Chicago points out that the study’s findings, conducted on 125 patients, are not final and should not be adopted to draw conclusions.
One of the study’s major limitations is that there was no control group. In other words, the effect of the drug was not compared with that of a second group taking a placebo.
The drug has also been used to fight MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), a virus that is also part of coronaviruses.
In an open letter to Gilead Sciences, a California-based bio-pharmacology company, more than 150 social organizations and activists from around the world have been urging the company to waive its claim to exclusive rights to the drug Remdesivir since late March. The initiative is from the Doctors Without Borders Foundation.
Gilead can claim exclusivity in its manufacturing and marketing, based on the patents it owns in over 70 countries. According to the open letter, the monopoly threatens the accessibility of Covid-19 treatment for millions of people around the globe.
Source: Exame