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Targeted drug development takes years, but when time is short in a pandemic, scientists and clinicians turn to pharmaceuticals that have been used to treat other diseases. In rapid fashion, doctors have already deployed a number of antivirals in attempts to fight back against COVID-19 and data from their studies are now coming in. So far, trials of existing antivirals have largely focused on the drug combination lopinavir-ritonavir, which are two Food and Drug Administration–approved HIV protease inhibitors, and remdesivir, which was originally developed to treat the Ebola virus and is not yet FDA approved.
The latest study to report back from the frontlines of the pandemic has been disappointing. The results of a randomized trial of lopinavir-ritonavir in 199 adults hospitalized with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, that were published this week (March 18) revealed no benefit in terms of time to clinical improvement in the patients ...
