Takeda Pharmaceutical Co logo can be seen in its new headquarters in Tokyo
Tokyo:
Japanese company Takeda Pharmaceutical Co said on Friday that an alliance of drugmakers it heads has enrolled its first patient in a global clinical trial of blood plasma treatment for COVID-19 after months of regulatory delays.
The group’s Phase 3 trial, known as the CoVIg Plasma Alliance, aims to enroll 500 adult patients from the United States, Mexico and 16 other countries, according to a statement.
Patients will be treated with Gilead Science Inc.’s Remdesivir alongside the plasma treatment, which will be supplied by CSL Behring, Takeda and two other companies.
“We hope that the data from the clinical trial will be available before the end of the year,” Bill Mezzanotte, chief medical officer of CSL Behring, said in the statement.
The group had a goal of starting the clinical trial in July, but it was delayed pending regulatory approval. The National Institutes of Health in the United States is the sponsor of the trial.
The alliance, which also includes German companies Biotest AG and Octapharma Plasma, is working on a therapy based on hyperimmune globulins derived from blood plasma. It offers a standardized dose of antibodies and does not need to be limited to patients with matching blood groups.
The World Health Organization has called for caution regarding plasma treatments for COVID-19, saying the evidence for their effectiveness was “low quality” even though the United States had issued an authorization for urgency for such therapies.
Testing and production of treatments is also vulnerable to a shortage of blood plasma in people who have recovered from COVID-19. In its post, the CoVIg Plasma Alliance urged these people to consider donating their plasma.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
