Gilead drug remdesivir didn’t help coronavirus patients, study finds

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An antiviral drug seen as a potentially promising treatment for the new coronavirus reportedly failed to help patients in a Chinese study. The clinical trial found that remdesivir — the Gilead Sciences medicine developed to treat Ebola — didn’t help COVID-19 patients recover faster or prevent them from dying, according to news reports. Results from …

An antiviral drug seen as a potentially promising treatment for the new coronavirus reportedly failed to help patients in a Chinese study.

The clinical trial found that remdesivir — the Gilead Sciences medicine developed to treat Ebola — didn’t help COVID-19 patients recover faster or prevent them from dying, according to news reports.

Results from the study leaked out Thursday after the World Health Organization accidentally published them on its website and then removed them. The WHO said the draft study is still going through peer review, according to the Financial Times (paywall), which first reported on it.

Shares of Gilead, which have risen steadily throughout the coronavirus crisis on hopes that it could deliver a blockbuster treatment, were recently off 4.9 percent at $77.31 on Thursday.

The revelation came just a week after early data from a trial at the University of Chicago Medical Center showed remdesivir was helping patients shake the deadly disease in as little as six days.

But Gilead isn’t giving up on the drug. The California-based company reportedly said “meaningful” conclusions can’t be drawn from the China study because it had too few patients and was shut down early.

“Trends in the data suggest a potential benefit for remdesivir, particularly among patients treated early in disease,” Gilead spokeswoman Amy Flood told STAT News.

The news roiled the stock market, where investors have been anxious for a treatment for the coronavirus that has rattled the global economy.

The S&P 500 index was up just 0.2 percent as of 2:42 p.m. after climbing 1.6 percent earlier in the day. And Gilead’s stock price plunged 9.2 percent to a low of $74.40.

The Chinese trial treated 158 coronavirus patients with remdesivir and compared them with 79 others who did not receive it, according to reports.

But it appeared that 13.9 percent of those who got the drug had died after a month while 12.8 percent of those in the control group had died, STAT News reported. The study determined that remdesivir “was not associated with clinical or virological benefits,” the Financial Times said.

Though it ended early, the study in China was reportedly randomized and had a control group unlike other remdesivir trials that had shown promise.

A report published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the drug helped more than two thirds of seriously ill COVID-19 patients improve, but it did not compare their results to a control group.

The National Institutes of Health are also running a randomized, double-blind study of remdesivir’s impact on coronavirus patients that started in February.