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Por Kate Kelland
LONDON, Jan 7 (Reuters) – Treating critically ill COVID-19 patients with the arthritis drugs Actemra from Roche (SIX 🙂 or Kevzara from Sanofi (PA 🙂 significantly improves survival rates and reduces the amount of time patients need intensive care, according to a study published Thursday.
The findings, not yet peer-reviewed, showed that the immunosuppressants Actemra, also known as tocilizumab, and Kevzara, also known as sarilumab, reduced death rates by 8.5 percentage points among hospitalized and seriously ill patients with COVID. .
That would mean that for every 12 patients treated with one of the two drugs, an extra life would be saved, said Anthony Gordon, professor of anesthesia and intensive care at Imperial College London, who co-led the study.
The data will boost confidence that some existing drugs could be reused to help contain a pandemic that has killed more than 1.87 million people and crushed world economies.
It also occurs as countries struggle to contain two variants of the virus identified in South Africa and Great Britain, which are more transmissible and have led to an increase in infections.
The data, from around 800 seriously ill COVID-19 patients who participated in an international study known as the REMAP-CAP trial, showed that the two drugs reduced mortality rates: from 35.8% in a control group to 27, 3% among patients who received tocilizumab or sarilumab.
“That’s a big change in survival,” Gordon stated. “Both are life-saving drugs.”
The results also showed that, on average, patients treated with Actemra or Kevzara recovered more quickly and were able to be discharged from intensive care units about 7 to 10 days earlier than those who did not receive these drugs, Gordon said.
“This … could have immediate implications for the sickest COVID-19 patients,” he added. “We are seeing the real benefit in terms of survival and faster recovery.”
So far, results for Actemra and Kevzara, both a type of drug known as an IL-6 receptor antagonist, in treatment trials in COVID-19 patients have been mixed. Sanofi said in September that Kevzara, which it produces alongside its partner Regeneron, failed to meet the main goals of a US study that tested it in critically ill COVID-19 patients.
Roche also indicated that month that Actemra helped reduce the need for ventilators in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, although the drug failed in a separate study of hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19-related pneumonia.
Gordon noted that previous studies had not found a clear benefit, but noted that those trials included less severely ill patients and began treatment at different stages in the course of the disease. “A crucial difference may be that in our study, critically ill patients were enrolled within 24 hours of starting organ support,” he said.
“This highlights a possible early window for treatment in which the sickest patients can derive the most benefit from immune modulating treatment.” Data from Thursday’s trial has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was published online on the medRxiv website.
(Reporting by Kate Kelland, Edited in Spanish by Janisse Huambachano)
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