Coronavirus: major drugs trial offers hopes for treatment

Coronavirus: major drugs


say that around one in three patients admitted hospital in the UK with Kovac 19 have died and that underlines the need for new treatments for coronavirus but several existing medicines for other conditions are undergoing trials in the world's biggest study of potential treatments as our medical correspondent Fergus Walsh tells us now what would the world give for a cure for coronavirus it has turned hospital wards into alien landscapes Stafford Addenbrooke's in Cambridge must be shielded from the highly infectious virus patients like Peter who's 89 must rely on oxygen the one thing known to help fighting for this baby babe that was all about day three oh it's for you the toll on individuals and their families has been enormous peter is part of a national trial which is examining five drugs used for other conditions to see if they work for coronavirus until they get results doctors have limited options so it's extraordinarily difficult to what a large number of patients get so incredibly unwell and know that we have no therapies anywhere in the world

 That are proven to be efficacious it means that there's an urgent health needs to do research in this space so that we can understand what treatments work and what don't drugs for HIV and malaria are being tried to see if they can help stop the virus replicating in the body other patients are being given treatments to reduce inflammation and dampen the immune system which can go haywire Jeff who's 60 has had cancer he can't shake off coronavirus after being infected six weeks ago why something's treated with chemo twice I've had full remission and the last one was only certainly ended last year and then when you get this he signed up for two clinical trials what's the point what's important coming into a hospital be pumped full of all sorts of things and nobody really knows what it was what there is okay probably what helped me but you know but it might help people that followed behind me the first results of the trials could come as early as June it'll be here at

 The big data Institute in Oxford 

that the trial results will be analyzed in a little over a month around 8,000 patients for nearly a hundred and seventy hospitals throughout the UK have been enrolled in what is the biggest clinical study in the world in two kovat 19 treatments at the peak we were enrolling 400 patients a day lessons have been learned from the swine flu pandemic when experimental treatments were not properly assessed the best example is the 2009 pandemic where tens of thousands of patients were treated with drugs outside of clinical trials and we didn't get any results we can't afford to do that again we need to know what works for covered 90 and so these trials 

I think of critically important don't expect a cure but even a treatment that is partially effective could save thousands of lives and pave the way for other better medicines and furgus is with me now clearly and understandably there is intense interest in the progress that scientists and others are making in this area so how would you sum up where we are in terms of the search for a cure well you none of the doctors or scientists I've spoken to is expecting a magic bullet something that will stop coronavirus in its tracks for the majority of patients it's great that the trials are underway but they are training drugs that would develop for other conditions now what we should hope for perhaps is a moderate effect from those if they are successful say something that reduced mortality by 20% it may not sound much but in the UK that could save thousands of lives now in the US tonight there are some early results from an antiviral drug originally developed for Ebola which are being hailed which seemed to suggest that it's cut the duration of symptoms in patients with coronavirus from 15 to 11 days but it comes off the back of some other data that suggested that it didn't work and that's why these trials are so important we've got to wait for them to come through in the coming months and then of course we've got to wait for the dozens of vaccines that are in development so it's going to be a long haul focus once again many thanks folks foster medical correspondent.