OT: Potentially Good news for a therapeutic
This could help. We need some good news. I want to believe.
"A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned."
Good thing the FDA granted Gillead exclusive rights to the drug as a "rare disease" treatment.
Because Covid-19 is so fucking rare.
Can't wait to see how much they'll charge per dose.
For real - it was rare 2 months ago - not anymore.
If I recall correctly, the "orphan disease" designation is an incredible boon to these companies and it's often abused by the pharmaceutical industry for tax breaks and exclusivity rights. Also IIRC, Gilead isn't exactly generous when it comes to pricing their prescription drugs. Giving them exclusive rights seems like a bad idea. If they charge a fair price, great, but I got my fingers crossed. (also Feurstein had a mixed rep back in the day).
Gilead gave up their Orphan Drug status a couple weeks ago.
Good.
Good, I didn't realize that..
While there are plenty of abuses, there are a lot of benefits to the Orphan Drug program too. Most pharma companies wouldnt spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a drug that only treats rare diseases. That is unless they have some assurances that they will see some returns on their investment.
One of the reasons some feel drug companies should get a giant cash prize from the government instead of patents. Find out what the patent value is of a drug and give that amount to the research company then make the drug immediately generic.
It's expected to go between $900 and $1000 per course.
https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/coronavirus-remdesivir-gilead-antiviral-drug-covid-19/573261/
The 'quine, z pak, zinc treatment is under $20.
I don’t know anything about drug pricing, but even if we assumed the same net outcomes and the claims on faster recovery were true, it seems like $1k would be a massive savings to the system vs the cost of the alternative stay in the ICU.
So with hospital drug markup around $2,500 per course. Probably not including other hospital charges for infusion visit.
Read that one trial is for 5 days of IV administration, another is 10 days. You would add those hospital costs to the drug costs.
Still, if it works, a small cost to pay.
Also, those are just pills you can pop, aren't they?
Administered IV.
Good article link but the article is from March 5th which is ancient in terms of how fast this Covid story is unfolding, and that estimate of cost is just one market analyst group's best guess. Exact wording as follows:
"Analysts at RBC Capital Markets expect Gilead would price the drug at around $900 to $1,000 or lower per course, a cost above oral flu drugs but below new intravenous antibiotics."
The drug itself is reportedly CHEAP TO MAKE, as I've noted many times on this thread, so the main cost would come in the hospitalization and delivery of the drug. Thus a 5 day course or less would be much less expensive than a full 10 day course (the studies will help to determine which course of treatment is best for how advanced a given infection has gone, of course).
And finally, ***IF*** the drug does indeed prove to be highly effective against CV-19 then I'd think, perhaps mistakenly, that it would be bought & sold in a *novel* way to ensure the widest, fastest possible worldwide distribution to ensure that the virus is stopped as quickly as possible, saving the most possible lives in the process. Or maybe I'm just being altruistically naive, but I think that it could not possibly just be 'business as usual' when it comes to something as critical as ending the plague that CV-19 has unleashed on the world these past months.
Of course we have to see if it's really as good as it seems first.
Gilead may be partnering with another large pharma company to get this going faster and at a larger scale. Stay tuned...
Awesome news. Hopefully by late summer / early fall both Remdesivir and Actemra are ready to go. That will be the one-two punch that takes the fatality rate back to something like the seasonal flu.
April 16th, 2020 at 10:36 PM ^
Surprising that you know about Actemra.
How did someone put it, stay tuned.
Don't tell Whitmer. She will ban it.
I laughed out loud at this. You'll never know it by the down votes but some of us think it's funny!
Gets about the same reaction on this site as the opinion gets among MI residents.
but at least the Chuds are making the same gripes about DeWine.
What’s a chud?
They are not a big deal really. It’s the hanging Chud that will throw you for a loop
Chud: .think of the spoiled son of a wealthy Ohio jet-ski dealer.
Knew there were a lot of dumbfucks on this board but had no idea of the quantity. Thanks for identifying yourselves.
Based on the downvotes and the comments, quarantine has severely broken many people’s ability to take a joke and/or detect sarcasm.
And that’s sadder than getting covid in your eyeballs
not quite - people are just getting good at detecting stupid jokes with a political slant
It’s a fucking joke. Get over yourself
Hate to break it to you, but this drug came about because of a joint venture between Gilead and the Obama administration.
I’m pretty sure that can’t possibly be right. I have it from very good authority that absolutely nothing good happened because of the Obama administration. This must be some fake news you heard on CNN.
April 16th, 2020 at 11:19 PM ^
Win for Obama is your message, right?
Politics is so fun!!!
April 16th, 2020 at 11:28 PM ^
All right, but apart from the sanitation... the medicine... education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Did the Obama administration ban landscaping and visiting your family?
No? Then I don't think is relevant.
This treatment was probably the betting favorite from the beginning, and it's also going to end up being the best studied. There are clinical trials underway all over the world. It largely failed in Phase III Ebola trials after promising Phase II, but initial tests in MERS and SARS again showed why it was an obvious candidate.
At the end of the day, you'll probably see a gold standard treatment involve a small-molecule drug like Remdesivir coupled with a large molecule monoclonal antibody against the viral spike protein, but large molecule therapies are so astronomically expensive it would be far better if this one falls squarely in the realm of good enough.
Yes, exactly right! Let's hope the results continue to roll in positively. The drug has already proved to be safe in humans and is ready to go once identified as most effective against COVID-19. I'm more optimistic about this than any other path forward in antiviral therapeutics and this Chicago U. study though still limited in numbers seems to offer a lot of hope.
AND it's cheap to make according to this article:
(scroll down to "Cheap to Make")
Yeah with 10's of thousands of scientists around the globe working on combating this there is no way a vaccine takes 18 months to be discovered and distributed. But it will be months at the least.
I’ll take my chances with Covid over a vaccine rushed to development before proper trials. 18 months would be highly unlikely to be enough time to get through phase 1 2 and 3 trials and ensure safety
Bet you could get plenty of people in nursing homes to volunteer for phase 2 trials or expedited phase 3 trials.
No proper safety is documented in an “expedited” trial
the safety concern is not that you will die hours after injection; it is the 9 months to year long follow up that can ensure safety.
That's true, as so would I if in that position.
Yeah I get that I am just some dumbfuk who has no idea what I'm talking about.
Other than that I have over a dozen customers who all run research facilities in the most bio-tech area of the country. Clinical trials take 60-90 days. Then data process. Then development. All that will be hyper streamlined but will still take 4 to 5 months if it started TODAY. Which isn't happening. Any of it as of now.
‘A Phase 1 clinical trial evaluating an investigational vaccine designed to protect against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has begun at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) in Seattle. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, is funding the trial. KPWHRI is part of NIAID’s Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium. The open-label trial will enroll 45 healthy adult volunteers ages 18 to 55 years over approximately 6 weeks. The first participant received the investigational vaccine today.” Today was March 16
Yep, they started trials a month or two ago. Looking toward the end of the earliest as the best case scenario if everything goes 100% right.
The technology used in the Kaiser Washington trial is novel and hansnt had success in the past. Let’s hope it works this time because that could shorten the 12-18 month vaccine timeline. But at this point the vaccine timeline hasn't changed I do expect treatments and antivirals to be available at some level in 6 months. Those can improve mortality rates.
"Yeah I get that I am just some dumbfuk who has no idea what I'm talking about."
Your words, not ours!
Fauci spoke a while ago about streamlining the approach by bankrolling companies to expedite development without certainty that a vaccine will work. That has been a historical blocker. Also, he mentions that they would enter subsequent phases earlier than normal.
And you are wrong about it taking 4-5 months. It will take longer under the most expedited scenario. And it is happening today.
There are a lot of good things happening. It's a shame the POTUS doesn't get out of the way and let the COVID Task Board articulate them!
I think most of the time is spent on testing to prove it is safe, not on development. I believe they have to start with small scale trials just to prove it is safe before even worrying about it being effective as a vaccine. Then you can move on to larger trials before finally moving on to manufacture and use. There is only so much that can be done. Ironically if effective treatments are found, it could slow down the vaccine process because there would be less impetus to allow corner cutting. If treatments lowered the mortality rate and time people were in the hospital, there would be less of a driver.
This is right. You can get a pretty good vaccine candidate in a few weeks in some cases. The clinical trials are what take a year-plus.
That's correct unless people want to volunteer themselves as human guinea pigs for an incompletely tested vaccine. Frankly a lot of people might want to do just that and I can't blame them. Esp. the elderly who might figure it's better to get some likely protection sooner than the longer bet with more certainty but perhaps not in time.
Harball, you are confusing the time it takes to develop and test a vaccine vs an antiviral. The OP is about an antiviral which is much faster. Vaccines are still realistically 12-18 months. There is one rna vaccine that started trials in Seattle but that technology has not worked yet in the past so put a lower probability on that succeeding. The OPs antiviral reference is one that has a higher probability of working. So that is good news.
We need to strip profit motive out of our decisions. Let’s not pretend those words weren’t said by a politician.