The listed pharmaceutical company Biotest has suffered a setback in the development of a cure for Corona.
The candidate trimodulin achieved “no improvement over the placebo group” in the clinical phase II study, said the company from Dreieich near Frankfurt.
The plan to apply for approval of the drug for severe Covid 19 diseases will be dropped.
Falk Heunemann
Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
Follow I follow
Biotest uses blood plasma as a raw material for its drugs. Trimodulin was obtained from blood donations from formerly ill Covid-19 patients in whom antibodies against the virus had formed. The agent should then be administered to other seriously ill patients who, for example, have not yet been vaccinated or suffer from an immunodeficiency. Biotest had hoped that trimodulin had already proven its effectiveness in severe pneumonia. In some cases, corona patients suffer from symptoms that are similar to those of pneumonia and then have to be artificially ventilated.
For the double-blind study, a total of 166 adult patients with severe Covid 19 disease in several countries were treated from October 2020 to June 2021; they received either trimodulin or a placebo. Now, according to the company, the analysis of the data has shown that there was no difference between the two patient groups, whether the course of the disease worsened or how many of the patients died. Biotest is therefore no longer seeking approval for the treatment of Covid-19, it said.