Coronavirus: No significant clinical benefits of remdesivir, claims a new Lancet study

Treatment with antiviral drug remdesivir may not significantly speed up recovery from COVID-19 in critically ill hospitalised patients compared to placebo, the first randomised trial of its kind published in The Lancet journal has claimed.

In the absence of any known treatment for COVID-19, remdesivir is one of a handful of experimental drugs undergoing clinical trials worldwide.

This has come in the wake of a US-based pharma company saying the phase three clinical trial of the antiviral drug remdesivir, led by a team of investigators, including an Indian-American physician, for the treatment of the coronavirus patients has showed positive results.

The Lancet study led by researchers from China-Japan Friendship Hospital and Capital Medical University in China involved 237 adults aged 18 and older from ten hospitals in Wuhan.

Although the study is the first randomised controlled trial -- considered the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions -- of remdesivir, the researchers cautioned that interpretation of their findings was limited because the study was stopped early after they were unable to recruit enough patients due to the steep decline in cases in China.

In the trial, all patients received standard care including lopinavir, ritonavir, interferons, and corticosteroids.
"Remdesivir did not provide significant benefits over placebo," said Professor Bin Cao from China-Japan Friendship Hospital and Capital Medical University.

Remdesivir was originally developed to treat Ebola, and is designed to interfere with the way a virus reproduces, thereby stopping it from multiplying inside the body, the researchers said.

The team noted that case studies have reported benefit in some severely ill patients with COVID-19, but until now, there have been no clinical trials of remdesivir, so its efficacy against COVID-19 in patients is unknown.

In the study, treatment with remdesivir did not result in significant reductions in viral load -- how much SARS-CoV-2 is present in an infected person's body -- or detection of the virus in the upper or lower respiratory tract compared with placebo.

"Remdesivir did not provide greater benefits in our study population as expected," said Professor Ronghui Du from Wuhan Lung Hospital, China.