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Gilead study finds remdesivir helps treat some coronavirus patients

Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir showed signs of helping certain coronavirus patients in a study showing better results from a shorter course of treatment, the company said Monday. People with moderate COVID-19 pneumonia who took a five-day treatment of remdesivir were 65 percent more likely to show “clinical improvement” at day 11 than people who …

Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir showed signs of helping certain coronavirus patients in a study showing better results from a shorter course of treatment, the company said Monday.

People with moderate COVID-19 pneumonia who took a five-day treatment of remdesivir were 65 percent more likely to show “clinical improvement” at day 11 than people who received standard care, according to results of the phase-three study Gilead released.

Patients who got a 10-day course of remdesivir also had “favorable” odds of improvement compared to standard care, the California-based company said — but they were not statistically significant, raising questions about why a longer course of treatment did not work better.

“The lack of benefit in the 10-day arm is a surprise, in our view,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Marc Engelsgjerd and Jenna Li said in a note. “We need details on the standard-of-care arm and expected a greater benefit, given this was an open-label study.”

Gilead shares dropped as much as 4.4 percent, to $74.40, on the news Monday. The company said it plans to submit the full research data to a peer-reviewed journal in the coming weeks.

The results still added to the evidence that remdesivir can help treat the deadly coronavirus disease that has killed more than 100,000 Americans. The US Food and Drug Administration approved it for emergency use last month after a federal trial showed it could help speed recovery.

“The additional data we have in hand today will further guide our research efforts, including evaluating treatment earlier in the course of disease, combination studies with other therapies for the most critically ill patients, pediatric studies and the development of alternate formulations,” Dr. Merdad Parsey, Gilead’s chief medical officer, said in a statement Monday.

First developed to treat Ebola, remdesivir remains an experimental drug and can only be used to treat severely ill COVID-19 patients, according to Gilead. The company says the medicine was “generally well-tolerated” among the moderately sick patients it studied, though some experienced nausea, diarrhea and headache.

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