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The pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences has announced this Wednesday that the treatment with the antiviral remdesivir improves the clinical condition of patients with severe forms of Covid-19. The improvement is found in almost 65% of those treated who also do not suffer significant side effects and obtain a benefit after five days of treatment.

The results just reported support the efficacy of this drug against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, thus rebutting the shadow of doubt that it cast when the World Health Organization momentarily published preliminary data from their study in which the drug it didn't stand out very well . Precisely, The Lancet magazine today publishes data from that randomized trial, carried out in hospitals in Wuhan, China, where no improvement was obtained with the treatment in 327 patients who received it.

Instead, the information the company presents this Wednesday is in line with the first hints glimpsed in a small, preliminary study published a few weeks ago in The New England Journal of Medicine . In this study, also about two thirds of very serious patients improved when receiving treatment through compassionate use. The study had the participation of the Hospital de La Paz in Madrid.

The results that the company has reported, in the absence of its publication in a scientific medium probably in the coming weeks, come from an international study that analyzes the drug in patients recruited from 180 centers around the world, including several hospitals throughout Spain; In total, they hope to be able to analyze the efficacy of the drug in 5,600 patients with severe Covid-19 , including also patients receiving mechanical ventilation.

According to the pharmacist, "the study showed that patients who received a 10-day remdesivir treatment achieved a similar improvement in clinical condition compared to those who took a 5-day treatment." These data raise the possibility that certain patients with Covid-19 may receive a shorter therapeutic regimen , without diminishing the positive effect of the therapy. From the outset, this would already mean that more patients could benefit from the drug, something "particularly important in the context of a pandemic", where all the resources are few.

One of the study's researchers, Aruna Subramanian, from Stanford University, California, calls the results "encouraging, as they indicate that patients who received a shorter course, five days of remdesivir, experienced similar clinical improvement to patients who received a 10-day course of treatment. While additional data is still needed, these results help to better understand how remdesivir treatment can be optimized , if it is shown to be safe and effective

Remdesivir is a medicine in the nucleotide analogue family. It was developed against the Ebola virus and has subsequently shown activity against the SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV coronaviruses.

Gilead is developing two phase 3 clinical trials with remdesivir, the Simple studies, in countries with a high prevalence of Covid-19; Along with these results with more seriously ill patients, the first data on the drug are expected in late May in patients with moderate disease.

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