Geneva (AFP)
The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis has announced that it is ending the clinical trial with hydroxychloroquine to treat patients with Covid-19 due to the lack of participants.
On April 20, the group announced that it had reached an agreement with the American drug agency, the Food and drug administration (FDA), to carry out phase III clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine on hospitalized Covid-19 patients. .
These trials aimed to evaluate the use of this treatment with approximately 440 patients at ten sites in the United States.
But on June 15, US health authorities withdrew authorization to use two treatments for Covid-19, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which were defended by US President Donald Trump, in an emergency.
The FDA had given the green light on March 28 so that these antimalarial treatments were prescribed, only in the hospital, to patients contaminated by the new coronavirus.
In a statement released Friday, Novartis said it made "the decision to stop and end the clinical trial with hydroxychloroquine against Covid-19 it sponsors due to serious recruitment difficulties" of participants, rendering "impossible" to finalize the study.
The group said that during the study, "no safety concerns were reported", and that it did not "draw conclusions about the effectiveness" of hydroxychloroquine against the new coronavirus.
The use of hydroxychloroquine has gone far beyond the scientific field and has become the subject of a political debate throughout the world that closes in public opinion.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has given up trials on this treatment this week, arriving at the conclusion that this antimalarial does not reduce the mortality rate of hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
France, where a controversial doctor, Professor Didier Raoult, defended hydroxychloroquine, banned its use on May 28 against Covid-19.
© 2020 AFP