What are potential treatments/ research that is occurring for COVID-19?

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What are potential treatments/ research that isoccurring for COVID-19?

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VACCINES ANTIBODIES AND DRUG LIBRARIES The Possible COVID19 Treatments Researchers Are Excited About In early April about four months after a new highly infectious coronavirus was first identified in China an international group of scientists reported encouraging results from a study of an experimental drug for treating the viral disease known as COVID19 It was a small study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine but showed that remdesivir an unapproved drug that was originally developed to fight Ebola helped 68 of patients with severe breathing problems due to COVID19 to improve 60 of those who relied on a ventilator to breathe and took the drug were able to wean themselves off the machines after 18 days Repurposing drugs designed to treat other diseases to now treat COVID19 is one of the quickest ways to find a new therapy to control the current pandemic Also in April researchers at Vanderbilt University enrolled the first patients in a muchanticipated study of hydroxychloroquine Its already approved to treat malaria and certain autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus but hasnt been studied until now against coronavirus Yet the medication has become a soughtafter COVID19 treatment after first Chinese doctors and then President Trump touted its potential in treating COVID19 The data from China is promising but not conclusive and infectious disease experts including Trumps coronavirus task force scientific advisor Dr Anthony Fauci arent convinced its ready for prime time yet in Americas emergency rooms and intensive care units But doctors facing an increasing flood of patients say they dont have time to wait for definitive data In a survey of 5000 physicians in 30 countries conducted by health care data company Sermo 44 prescribed hydroxychloroquine for their COVID19 patients and 38 believed it was helping Such offlabel use in using a drug approved to treat one disease to treat another is allowed especially during a pandemic when no other therapies are available A similar percentage said remdesivir was very or extremely effective in treating COVID19 Although remdesivir is not approved for treating any disease the Food and Drug Administration granted special authorization for doctors to use it to treat the sickest COVID19 patients That explains the unprecedented speed with which the hydroxychloroquine studyand others like itare popping up around the world There are no treatments proven to disable SARSCoV2 the virus that causes the disease which means all the options scientists are exploring are still very much in the trialanderror stage Still they are desperate for anything that might provide even a slim chance of helping their patients survive which is why studies are now putting dozens of different therapies and a handful of vaccines to the test The normal road to developing new drugs is often a long oneand one that frequently meanders into dead ends and costly mistakes with no guarantees of success But given the speed at which SARSCoV2 is infecting new hosts on every continent across the globe those trials are being ushered along at a breakneck pace telescoping the normal development and testing time by as much as half RELATED STORIES South Korea Gives Maryland 500K COVID19 Tests Georgia The newly launched Vanderbilt study led by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute of the US National Institutes of Health will enroll more than 500 people who have been hospitalized with COVID19 and randomly assign them to receive hydroxychloroquine or placebo It would be the first definitive trial to test whether hydroxychloroquine should be part of standard therapy for treating COVID19 and its lead scientist expects results in a few months The sense of urgency is pushing other researchers at academic institutes as well as pharmaceutical companies to turn to their libraries of thousands of approved drugs or compounds that are in early testing and screening to see if any can disable SARSCoV2 Because these are either already approved and deemed safe for people if any emerge as possible antiCOVID19 therapies companies could begin testing them in people infected with the virus within weeks Other teams are mining recovered patients blood for precious COVID19fighting immune cells and because the virus seems to attack the respiratory system scientists are also finding clever ways to stop it from compromising lung tissue These are all stopgap measures however since ultimately a vaccine against COVID19 is the only way to arm the worlds population against new waves of infection Established pharmaceutical powers like Johnson Johnson Sanofi and Glaxo SmithKline are racing shouldertoshoulder to with startups using new technology to develop dozens of potential new vaccines with the hope of inoculating the first people next yearnone too soon before what public health officials anticipate might be another season of either the same or potentially new coronavirus We know these viruses reside in animal species and surely another one will emerge says Dr David Ho director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and professor of medicine at Columbia University who is heading an effort to screen antiviral drug compounds for new COVID19 treatments We need to find permanent solutions to treating them and should not repeat the mistake that once an epidemic wanes interest and political will and funding also wanes Plasma Antibodies and More Its an oldschool approach that dates back to the late 19th century but the intuitive logic behind using plasma from recovered patientstechnically called convalescent plasmaas a treatment might still apply today Plasma treatments have been used with some success to treat measles mumps and influenza The idea is to use immune cells extracted from the blood of people who have recovered from COVID19 and infuse them into those who are infected giving them passive immunity to the disease which could at least minimize some of its more severe symptoms Its part of a broader range of tactics that utilize the bodys own immune response as a molecular North Star for charting the course toward new treatments And by far antibodies against the virus are the most abundant and efficient targets so a number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are concentrating on isolating the ones with the strongest chance of neutralizing SARSCoV2 In late March New York Blood Center became the first US facility to start collecting blood from recovered COVID19 patients specifically to treat other people with the disease Doctors at New Yorks Mount Sinai Health System are now referring recovered and willing patients to the Blood Center which collects and processes the plasma and See Answer

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