Here & Now

A Closer Look At Remdesivir, An Experimental

Coronavirus Drug 05:59

March 30, 2020 By Robin Young and Allison Hagan

Gilead makes remdesivir, an antiviral drug that shows promise in treating COVID-19, the disease
caused by the new coronavirus. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

Biotech company Gilead Sciences announced over the weekend that it will
expand access to its experimental treatment for the coronavirus — called
remdesivir — aer it halted emergency access.

Remdesivir has been tested against many different viruses and shown “good
activity in the laboratory” against coronaviruses, says Rear Admiral Richard
Childs. The antiviral agent isn’t new, but it’s never been approved for use, he
says.

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“It interferes with the ability of the RNA virus to reproduce itself, interfering
with the total number of viral particles that can invade different organs,
particularly the lung,” the assistant surgeon general and lung specialist at
the National Institutes of Health says.
Childs led a team sent to Japan to screen Americans on the Diamond
Princess cruise ship and bring them home. Some of the sickest patients were
given remdesivir, he says.

Of the 51 Americans hospitalized throughout Japan with COVID-19, 14 were

critically ill. With the average age of 75 years old, these patients had severe
pneumonia and were put on ventilators or ECMO machines, which are heart
lung bypass machines, in intensive care units, he says.

“Looking at those rst X-rays, it just hit you that, wow, this is something
different,” he says. “This is a very, very severe virus that can cause incredible
morbidity and mortality.”

Seven severe cases who qualied for the treatment were given remdesivir
intravenously once a day for 10 days — and all of them survived. But Childs
says this doesn’t prove remdesivir works as a treatment for the coronavirus.

The goal with antiviral and other treatments is to “buy time for the immune
system to kick in,” and ght the virus, he says.

“It's really impossible to say with any certainty what role this drug played in
their recovery,” he says. “What we learned was that you have to be incredibly
aggressive with providing supportive care that's focused on the lungs.”

If you can keep patients with severe pneumonia alive using ventilators or
ECMO machines, their immune systems will eventually gure out how to
eradicate the virus, he says.

In Japan, doctors would move patients with struggling lungs to more

advanced hospitals that can provide medical ventilation, he says. If their
lungs looked like they would die on the ventilator, the doctors would move
the patient to a tertiary medical center with ECMO machines in case they
needed life support.
There’s a sense of desperation for an effective COVID-19 treatment and some
people are jumping to unhelpful conclusions, Childs says. Gilead scientists
say the company is overwhelmed with remdesivir orders, and some people
are self-treating with antimalarial drug chloroquine.

Childs warns against assuming certain treatments are effective because they
worked on some people. It’s better to wait for randomized trials that show a
particular drug improves the chances of survival, he says.

“If we make that assumption incorrectly, then we are giving something to a

person that may not be helping them, could potentially harm them and
could be harmful in the sense that it prevents them from getting the real
effective therapy,” he says. “If we just base all of our treatments on anecdotal
evidence, there is a real possibility that several months from now we may be
treating patients incorrectly.”

Jill Ryan produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Peter
O'Dowd. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.

This segment aired on March 30, 2020.

Robin Young Co-Host, Here & Now

Robin Young brings more than 25 years of broadcast experience to her role
as host of Here & Now.
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Allison Hagan Digital Producer

Allison Hagan is Here & Now's freelance digital producer.
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