New evidence supports this anti-viral drug as COVID-19 treatment

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The news about remdesivir, the anti-viral drug that has shown early promise in the fight against COVID-19, keeps getting better.

In a new study, researchers reported that remdesivir could inhibit SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, in human lung cell cultures, and that it improved lung function in mice infected with the virus.

These findings help explain the clinical effect the drug has had in treating COVID-19 patients.

Remdesivir has been given to patients hospitalized with COVID-19 on a compassionate use basis since late January and through clinical trials since February.

The research was conducted by a team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and elsewhere.

COVID-19, which to date has infected more than 12 million people and killed nearly 600,000 worldwide, is at least the third instance since 2003 in which a coronavirus originally transmitted from bats has caused serious illness in humans.

Thus there is an urgent need to identify and evaluate broadly efficacious and robust therapies that can limit and prevent coronavirus infections.

The researchers were the first to perform detailed studies to demonstrate that remdesivir, which was developed to combat hepatitis C and respiratory syncytial virus, and later the Ebola virus, also showed broad and highly potent activity against coronaviruses in laboratory tests.

In April, a preliminary report suggested that patients who received the drug recovered more quickly.

The current study provides the first rigorous demonstration of potent inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 in continuous and primary human lung cultures.

The study is also the first to suggest that remdesivir can block the virus in a mouse model.

In addition to SARS-CoV-2, studies have shown that remdesivir is effective against a vast array of coronaviruses, including other bat viruses that could emerge in the future in humans.

The team says all of the results with remdesivir have been very encouraging, even more so than they would have hoped.

Ongoing clinical trials will determine precisely how much it benefits patients in different stages of COVID-19 disease.

One author of the study is VUMC’s Andrea Pruijssers, Ph.D.

The study is published in Cell Reports.

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