Gilead Sciences Inc's (NASDAQ: GILD) drug Remdesivir is showing promise in early testing on coronavirus patients. Still, the company and some experts are cautious against hailing the drug as the "cure" for the virus. Outlook on Remdesivir has faltered somewhat after the Chinese government suspended trials of the drug.
Patients received the drug once a day for up to 10 days; two-thirds of patients improved over time, and half were released from the hospital. More than half of the group were severely ill and on ventilation. In addition to the trial group, members of the United States Armed Forces who were sick with the virus were also given Remdesivir, two of whom recovered.
Experts were quick to caution against calling the drug the "silver bullet" to combat the coronavirus, however. The small scale of the initial trial and the lack of anything to compare data against to measure effectiveness makes it hard for experts to accurately call Remdesivir a "cure." "The results are somewhat encouraging but aren't nearly enough," says Dr. Mark Ebell of the University of Georgia. "You simply cannot conclude that any drug works without a comparison or control group. That is one of the basic principles of evidence-based medicine - that we should base our use of a medicine on the results of well designed, unbiased randomized trials. Simply giving a drug to a series of patients without a group that didn't get the drug is not very helpful."
Hope for the drug was somewhat dashed after Chinese authorities suspended tests on patients. Enrollment in the Chinese trial was halted as "The epidemic of COVID-19 has been controlled well in China, no eligible patients can be enrolled at present," according to ClinicalTrials.gov. Evercore Analyst Umer Raffat noted that a large number of clinical trials were already underway in China, which may have led to a shortage of available participants.