There is currently no vaccine against COVID-19 infection. (Representative)
Moscow:
Russia to start giving first drug approved to treat COVID-19 to patients next week, donor said, decision she hopes will ease tensions on healthcare system and speed up the return to a normal economic life.
Russian hospitals can start giving the antiviral drug, which is registered under the name of Avifavir, to patients from June 11, the head of the Russian sovereign fund RDIF told Reuters. He said the company behind the drug would manufacture enough to treat around 60,000 people a month.
There is currently no vaccine against COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, and human trials of several existing antiviral drugs have not yet shown their effectiveness.
A new antiviral drug from Gilead called remdesivir has shown promise in small efficacy trials against COVID-19 and is administered to patients in some countries according to compassionate or emergency use rules.
Avifavir, known generically as favipiravir, was first developed in the late 1990s by a Japanese company that was later bought by Fujifilm during its transition to healthcare.
RDIF chief Kirill Dmitriev said Russian scientists had changed the drug to improve it, and said Moscow would be ready to share the details of the changes within two weeks.
Japan has tested the same drug, known as Avigan. It has won praise from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and $ 128 million in government funding, but has yet to be approved for use.
Avifavir appeared on a Russian government list of approved drugs on Saturday.
Accelerated process
Dmitriev said clinical trials of the drug have been conducted with 330 people and have shown that it has been successful in treating the virus in most cases within four days.
Trials were expected to be completed in about a week, he said, but the Ministry of Health has agreed to use the drug as part of a special expedited process and manufacturing began in March .
Clinical trials to test the effectiveness of drugs usually take several months, even when accelerated, and involve a large number of randomly assigned patients who receive either the test drug, a control, or a placebo.
The success of small, small-scale, early-stage trials is no guarantee of success in later, more comprehensive trials.
A study released this month, for example, linked the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which U.S. President Donald Trump says he took and urged others to use, to an increased risk of death in COVID-19 hospital patients.
Dmitriev said Russia has been able to reduce testing times because the Japanese generic drug on which Avifavir is based was first registered in 2014 and had undergone extensive testing before Russian specialists changed it.
“We think it is a game-changer. It will reduce the pressure on the health care system, we will have fewer people in dire straits,” said Dmitriev. “We believe that the drug is essential to resume full economic activity in Russia.”
With 414,878 cases, Russia has the third highest number of infections in the world after Brazil and the United States, but its official death toll is 4,855, which has been the subject of debate.
RDIF, which owns a 50% stake in the manufacturer of the drug ChemRar, has funded trials and other work with its partners to the tune of about 300 million rubles ($ 4.3 million), said Dmitriev, who explained that the costs for Russia were much lower. due to previous development work in Japan.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
