The American pharmaceutical company Merck has developed an experimental antiviral drug in the form of a pill, after which, according to preliminary studies, the risk of being infected hospitalized or dying after coronavirus infection is halved. However, the company has not yet published the results of the study in a professional journal.
According to experts, this could be a breakthrough in the fight against the disease. The company plans to apply for emergency drug approval in the United States in the next two weeks. A tablet of the medicine called molnupiravir was given by doctors twice a day during tests to people who had recently been diagnosed with coronavirus. According to Merck, the results of the clinical trials were so good that the company’s independent consultants recommended terminating the studies prematurely.
“An orally administered antiviral drug that has such an impact on the risk of hospitalization would change the rules of the game,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, told Reuters.
Covid-19 is now being treated primarily with the antiviral drug remdisivir from Gilead Sciences and the steroid dexamethasone. However, both drugs are usually not given to patients until they have been admitted to a hospital with a severe course of the disease, and are usually given by infusion.
According to Adalja, current drugs are “cumbersome and logistically difficult to administer to patients”. “A simple pill for oral administration would be the exact opposite,” the expert said.
The cure was originally for the flu
Molnupiravir was originally developed to treat influenza and is designed to make errors in the genetic code of the virus, preventing it from spreading further in the body. Merck claims that the drug will also be effective against possible future variants of the virus.
The researchers tested the drug in 775 patients who had been diagnosed with coronavirus less than five days ago. Some of them gave molnupiravir and the other a placebo, an inactive substance. In subjects with molnupiravir, 7.3 percent of patients required hospitalization, compared with 14.1 percent in the placebo control group. No one died among those who were given the right medicine. Of the patients who received the inactive substance, eight died.
Merck is the first company to come up with clinical trial results for its antiviral pill, but a number of other companies are working on similar drugs. Pfizer recently launched clinical trials of two of its antivirals, with Atea Pharmaceuticals and the Swiss company Roche also working on anti-covid-19 pills.
Merck plans to produce enough drugs for 10 million patients by the end of this year, while the US government has already confirmed that it will buy molnupiravir for $ 1.2 billion (26.2 billion crowns) if approved by the US FDA to treat covid-19.
White House pandemic team chief Jeff Zients said on Friday that molnupiravir was “a possible additional tool to protect people from the worst effects of covid-19.” However, he added that vaccination was still the best way to fight coronavirus.
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