President Donald Trump said today that he’s taking hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that’s being tested as a COVID-19 treatment at the University of Washington and dozens of other sites across the country.
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The search for COVID-19 therapies has turned to an antibody that was first identified back in 2003, in a blood sample from a patient who recovered from a similar coronavirus-based disease.
Massachusetts-based Moderna’s share price — and the stock market as a whole — were lifted today by the company’s encouraging report about a coronavirus vaccine trial that got its start at Seattle’s Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.
One of the treatments that’s been talked up by President Donald Trump for COVID-19 — a combination of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, an antibiotic — is the subject of a nationwide study with UW Medicine playing a role.
The Phase 2b clinical trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health, will involve 2,000 outpatients who have tested positive for COVID-19 and are in the early stages of treatment.
“We know from a number of different other kinds of infections that if antiviral treatment is going to be effective, it tends to be most effective if it’s given very early on,” Ann Collier, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, said in a video about the study.
The organizers of the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, a virus-tracking project supported by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, say their efforts are being paused while they deal with concerns raised by the Food and Drug Administration.
Word of SCAN’s suspension came just a day after the world’s second-richest person praised the effort in GatesNotes, his personal blog. “It has the potential to become an important tool for health officials seeking insights about the spread and behavior of the virus,” Gates wrote.
SCAN aims to track the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 throughout the Seattle area by sending out at-home tests and picking them up for analysis, with logistical support from Amazon Care, the health care program for Amazon employees. Over the past seven weeks, tests have been sent out to about 12,500 test subjects, including people with symptoms and people without symptoms.
The project had been operating under an arrangement by which the FDA let state public health officials issue Emergency Use Authorizations for coronavirus tests developed within their states. Today, SCAN said it was notified that separate federal authorization is now required to return test results, due to revisions in the guidance that were issued last week.
SCAN said it’s been working to address the FDA’s questions and hopes to have full authorization “soon.”
Washington state public health officials have broadened their guidance to say that anyone who has COVID-19 symptoms, or has been in close contact with a person who has the disease, should get tested as soon as possible.
The coronavirus vaccine trial that started out in Seattle is progressing well enough to get onto Food and Drug Administration’s fast track for development, with planning well underway for the next two phases of testing.
Seattle’s Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute kicked off the Phase I clinical trial, which focuses on ensuring that the vaccine is safe for humans.
The first participants got their shots in mid-March, and last month, the trial was expanded to Emory University in Atlanta and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Vaccine Research Clinic in Bethesda, Md. NIAID is funding the trial, and the vaccine was developed by Moderna Therapeutics.
Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and its clinical-care partner, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, are receiving a $500,000 grant from Bank of America to promote COVID-19 testing efforts as well as measures to protect against the pandemic.
Unprecedented collaborations involving the biotech industry and government agencies are urgently needed to develop and produce the billions of doses of vaccine that will be needed to stop the coronavirus pandemic, four public-health pioneers declare.
The experts behind the call to action, published today by the journal Science, include Larry Corey, a past president and director of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a professor in its vaccine and infectious disease division.
Corey’s co-authors are Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; John Mascola, director of NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center; and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
Their essay holds up a public-private partnership known as Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Innovations and Vaccines, or ACTIV, as a model for the collaboration that’ll be needed to address the coronavirus challenge.
“We’re experiencing a series of unprecedented events with a disease that has spread globally and infected more people in a shorter time than any other infection in modern times,” Corey said in a news release. “In order to overcome the challenges in front of us, we each need to bring nothing short of our absolute best.”
In a newly published study, a University of Washington researcher argues that the eventual death toll from COVID-19 could be more than twice as high as the figures currently being discussed.
The study was written by Anirban Basu, a health economist and statistician who’s the director of UW’s Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy and Economics Institute, also known as the CHOICE Institute.
In his research paper, published online May 7 by the journal Health Affairs, Basu acknowledges there’s still lots of uncertainty surrounding the fatality rate for the disease caused by the coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2. But he says there’s evidence that the U.S. death toll could amount to 350,000 to 1.2 million.
“This is a staggering number, which can only be brought down with sound public health measures,” Basu said in an interview with MedicalResearch.com.