Patients treated with the drug were half as likely to require mechanical ventilation as those who got standard care, CMAJ reports.
Canadian health officials are hopeful that the antiviral medication remdesivir will be more widely used, after a Canadian study found that COVID-19 patients treated with it were half as likely to require mechanical ventilation as those who received standard care.
Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto and a member of the provincial science table, said remdesivir has so far been underutilized in Canada.
“We’ve been recommending remdesivir for months in Ontario,” said Morris, who said the drug is often prescribed here. “I’m hoping with this publication and the fact that we now have Canadian data that supports it, around the country we’ll be seeing more people using remdesivir because that should be the standard of care.”
Remdesivir, an antiviral drug originally developed to treat Ebola, is recommended for mildly to moderately ill patients who may need oxygen support but not intensive care. The treatment is administered intravenously. According to Morris, it prevents the progression of the virus and stops it from proliferating.
A new study billed as the largest-single country trial to date of remdesivir, published Wednesday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, suggests the drug could have a “modest but significant effect” on COVID patient results as well as reducing by about 50 per cent the requirement for mechanical ventilation.
The Canadian trial, headed by researchers at the University of British Columbia and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, recruited nearly 1,300 COVID patients at 52 hospitals between Aug. 14, 2020, and April 1, 2021. About half the patients received remdesivir treatment while the rest received standard care.
Of the patients not receiving ventilation at the beginning of the trial, eight per cent of those receiving remdesivir treatment required a ventilator, compared to 15 per cent of those that got the standard level of care.
“Some of the patients were half as likely to be put on a ventilator and had about five fewer days of needing oxygen in the hospital,” said Dr. Robert Fowler, a senior scientist at Sunnybrook and co-author of the study.
Fowler explained that the research was done in conjunction with a larger study called the World Health Organization’s Solidarity, a global randomized control trial “designed to provide robust results on whether a drug can save lives in those hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19.”
The research is also “the first to evaluate the effects of the medication on a diverse — by province, age, ethnicity, severity of illness — Canadian population,” Fowler said.
Morris speculated that confusion surrounding previous data on remdesivir has led to the drug being underused in the treatment of COVID-19 patients in Canada, but said he expects to “see substantial uptake of remdesivir use in Canada because of this study.”
In May 2020, a clinical trial sponsored by the American National Institutes of Health suggested the treatment showed some promise in reducing recovery time for COVID patients.
The World Health Organization in November 2020 issued a conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, saying there is “currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.”
According to Morris, the WHO “continue to study it and have now been sitting on data for over six months and haven’t released that data.”
“This Canadian trial is consistent with the NIH study,” Morris maintained.
Both the Canadian Medical Association and Health Canada said they did not have data tracking how frequently the drug is being used across the country.
Matthias Götte, chair of medical microbiology and immunology at University of Alberta, said that while remdesivir treatment was being administered in Alberta, “The drug was likely underused in Canada due to mixed results in early clinical trials (NIH vs. WHO). An increased uptake is now expected based on the new Canadian study.”
The study comes days after Health Canada authorized paxlovid, the first at-home, oral antiviral treatment for COVID, which in clinical trials showed to be highly successful at reducing hospitalizations. According to Morris, around 30,000 courses of paxlovid arrived at airports in Canada earlier this week and a bigger shipment is expected to arrive in March.
Article From: The Star
Author: Ghada Alsharif
