Coronavirus: drugs including remdesivir may prove effective before vaccine is available, South Korean expert says
- Effectiveness of Gilead’s remdesivir and other repurposed drugs may be proven in 3 to 4 months, a leading coronavirus expert says
- ‘Not very optimistic’ about seeing a vaccine within 18 months
South Korea’s top coronavirus expert said the time frame for effective Covid-19 treatment may be much shorter than what is needed to develop a vaccine, and singled out Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir as a hopeful candidate.
Dr Kim Woo Joo, who led South Korea’s response to Covid-19 and the outbreak of Mers in 2015, said he was “not very optimistic” about the availability of a Covid-19 vaccine in the next 18 months, but said evidence about the effectiveness of remdesivir, an experimental antiviral developed to treat Ebola; AbbVie’s Kaletra, an anti-HIV drug; or other medicines might be possible sooner.
“If everything goes well, I am hoping that the effectiveness of these drugs will be scientifically proven within three to four months,” Kim, a professor of infectious diseases at Korea University Guro Hospital, said in an interview on Wednesday with the president of the Korea Society, Thomas Byrne.
Kim added that Seoul National University Hospital and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr Anthony Fauci – a key player in the US government’s effort to control the coronavirus spread – were collaborating to test remdesivir, which emerged this week as possible treatment option.
The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two phase-3 clinical trials and gave them daily remdesivir infusions, according to Stat. Of those patients, 113 had severe symptoms, the report said.
