Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
It’s been some days since I posted on the hydroxychloroquine situation versus the coronavirus epidemic, but I have been getting plenty of inquiries. So let’s have a look at what’s been going on! Several people have pointed out this new preprint, a retrospective look at 568 patients in Wuhan. Update: there is something odd about… Read More
Since we’ve been dealing with a lot of clinical trial data around here, I thought I would field a question from my email that might get to some things that others are thinking about as well. Here (with permission of its sender) is the idea: . . .it does seem, from the outside, like most… Read More
We’ve had several releases of remdesivir data, and this was not exactly one of those controlled-release formulations. No, this was more in the “chaotic mess” category, with news items coming from several sources with partial information. I decided not to blog on it until the loud banging noises stopped, and I’m glad I did, s… Read More
It’s been looking for some time as if these coronavirus infections need a biphasic approach to therapy – an antiviral approach earlier on, and for those in serious trouble, perhaps a shift to immune modulation as the body’s reaction to the virus starts doing even more harm. That post goes into some detail on possible… Read More
Well, everyone was just dealing with the news that Gilead’s antiviral remdesivir had had two trials suspended in China, when Stat‘s Adam Feuerstein and Matthew Herper broke news last night about a trial here in the US. 125 patients had been recruited at the University of Chicago to receive daily doses of remdesivir, and the… Read More
Time for another look at the coronavirus vaccine front, since we have several recent news items. Word has come from GSK and Sanofi that they are going to collaborate on vaccine development, which brings together two of the more experienced large organizations in the field. It looks like Sanofi is bringing the spike protein and… Read More
I wrote here the other day on the recent recommendation that people taking either ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitors or ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers) should not alter their treatment regimens because of the coronavirus outbreak. Some background on the angiotensin system is here, and here’s an open-access review for those wh… Read More
One minor side effect of the pandemic is that perhaps more people will learn about what drug research and clinical trials can really be like. Today’s example: we have a clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine from Wuhan that has just published on a preprint server. What’s good is that this one is blinded, randomized, and controlled… Read More
Dr. Didier Raoult of Marseilles and his co-workers have published another preprint on clinical results with the chloroquine/azithromycin combination that their earlier work has made famous. And I still don’t know what to think of it. This is going to be a long post on the whole issue, so if you don’t feel like reading… Read More
Time to catch up with the latest clinical news in the field. The big story this morning is apparently some real data out of a controlled trial of chloroquine from China. There have been anecdotal reports, but to the best of my knowledge we have seen no actual numbers. These are not exactly from the… Read More
