By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, May 21, 2020 (HealthDay News) — A combination drug therapy for COVID-19 aims to both prevent the virus from spreading inside the human body as well as quelling the immune system havoc that the germ wreaks.
A U.S. federally funded clinical trial is testing whether the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir works better against COVID-19 if given with a powerful anti-inflammatory drug called baricitinib.
“Baricitinib is a once-daily oral drug that has been well-tolerated in many studies examining its use in rheumatoid arthritis. It has very few drug interactions, so can [it] be combined with most antivirals such as remdesivir,” said Dr. Vincent Marconi, a professor of medicine and global health at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
This isn’t the only study looking at combining remdesivir with another drug.
The Washington state-based biotech firm CytoDyn is preparing a clinical trial that would combine remdesivir with leronlimab, a drug that inhibits viral infection and also has shown some anti-inflammatory effects, the company announced this week.
Why add other drugs to a remdesivir regimen? Remdesivir has been shown to stop the COVID-19 coronavirus from multiplying in humans, but its effect in improving patients’ health has been “modest,” said Dr. Richard Novak, head of infectious disease research with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).
Researchers suspect that might be because the antiviral drug does nothing to counter the immune system’s extreme reaction to COVID-19 in severe cases — a wave of intense inflammation