The US pharmaceutical company MSD plans to apply for approval for its corona drug Molnupiravir in the US and other countries shortly. The reason for this are recent successes in the treatment of Covid 19 patients with the antiviral drug. The number of hospital admissions and deaths had been cut by half by taking the drug, MSD announced on Friday. So far, the information is based only on the group’s announcement; a study is not available.
If molnupiravir receives approval, it would only be the second targeted antiviral drug that can be used to treat Covid-19 – and one of the few drugs in the sparse arsenal against Covid-19. Molnupiravir inhibits the reproduction of Sars-CoV-2 and other viruses. This also applies to Remdesivir, which is also approved for the treatment of Covid-19, but has recently disappointed in studies. Antibodies against the corona virus have also not fulfilled hopes recently. The cortisone preparation dexamethasone, on the other hand, is much more effective, although it is only given late in the course of the disease and has no specific antiviral effect.
Molnupiravir, on the other hand, is said to intervene at an early stage in the course of the disease. In addition, the preparation that was originally developed against the flu is a swallowable capsule; the other Covid-19 therapies, on the other hand, have to be injected or administered via infusion. As part of the molnupiravir study, 775 adults with mild to moderate disease were given the drug or just a dummy drug five days after the onset of Covid-19 symptoms. All of the test subjects had a particularly high risk of a serious disease course due to previous illnesses such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. The subjects took four capsules twice a day for five days.
Those who received molnupiravir instead of placebo fared significantly better: According to MSD, 7.3 percent of these patients were hospitalized within 30 days; in the placebo group it was 14.1 percent. During that time, eight people in the placebo group had died, but none in the molnupiravir group.
According to the preliminary data, the drug halves the number of hospitalizations and deaths
When these results came to light in an interim evaluation, an independent panel of experts recommended that the study be discontinued. It is common for such a body to oversee clinical studies. Actually, the study should have continued until November – but in the opinion of the panel, the positive effects of molnupiravir were too clear for the placebo group to continue with the therapy.
“The results exceeded my expectations for the drug in this clinical trial,” said Dean Li, vice president of research at MSD. “If the number of hospitalizations or deaths can be reduced by 50 percent, there is a significant clinical effect.” The benefit of the drug is further enhanced by the fact that it is “simply a tablet that you can take at home”. Independent experts were also convinced: “I think that this translates into many thousands of lives saved worldwide,” said Robert Shafer, infectiologist and expert on antiviral therapies at Stanford University. the New York Times.
The US government has already announced that it will buy 1.7 million doses of the drug. However, the drug must be taken in good time: In previous studies, molnupiravir was no longer able to help severely ill Covid 19 patients who had to be treated in hospital. Two more drugs with antiviral effects could follow shortly. Clinical studies are already underway with similar agents from Pfizer, Atea and Roche.