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  • Vacunas Sanidad authorizes the first clinical trial of a Spanish vaccine against Covid-19

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced this Wednesday the start of trials in hospitalized patients with three new possible treatments that will use the drugs artesunate (produced by the pharmaceutical company Ipca), imatinib (from Novartis) and infliximab (from Johnson & Johnson).

The

artesunate

until now was used to treat severe cases of malaria,

imatinib

in some cancers, and

infliximab

for rheumatoid arthritis and diseases that attack the immune system, WHO said in a statement.

All three products have been donated by their manufacturers and were selected by an independent panel of experts, "given their potential in reducing the risk of death in COVID-19 patients," the Geneva-based organization said.

With them, the second phase of Solidarity trials begins, which

in its first stage did not achieve positive results after testing four treatments in patients

: hydroxychloroquine (initially created against malaria), the antiviral remdesivir, interferon or the antiretrovirals lopinavir and ritonavir .

The WHO concluded at the end of last year that none of these four treatments achieved significant reductions in the length of hospitalizations, deaths from COVID-19 or the number of people requiring ventilation.

In contrast to the rapid development of anticovid vaccines, with more than a dozen already in use globally, the WHO currently recognizes

only two treatments as effective for severe cases of COVID-19: dexamethasone, a corticosteroid, and the use of interleukin-6 antagonists

.

While the former is easily accessible worldwide, due to the low price of dexamethasone, interleukin-6 is a high-cost treatment that the WHO itself warned would not be available to most patients in developing countries .

The Solidarity trials (Solidarity PLUS in this new phase) will involve thousands of researchers in 600 hospitals in 52 countries, 16 more than in the first phase of trials, WHO announced

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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