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Bloomberg
China will release results at the end of April from clinical trials of a Gilead Sciences Inc drug that is emerging as a frontrunner in the race to find an effective treatment for the novel coronavirus.
The outcome of trials of the experimental medication remdesivir on 761 patients in Wuhan, the city where
the virus originated, will be made public on April 27, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration said on Tuesday.
The update on the trials’ progress came a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) said that remdesivir may be the only effective treatment so far for the disease, which has infected almost 80,000 people and killed over 2,600, most of them in China, and has no approved therapy or vaccine so far.
As new infections surge in South Korea, Italy and the Middle East, presaging a second spike in an outbreak that was previously concentrated in China, the push to develop treatments and vaccines has taken on new urgency globally.
On Tuesday, Fujifilm Holdings Corp surged after its flu drug was mentioned by Japan as a treatment, while pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Sanofi are developing vaccines for the pathogen whose spread has shut down travel and economic activity across the world.
Foster City, California-based Gilead, whose remdesivir is not licensed or approved for use anywhere in the world, seems poised to benefit as confidence grows in its drug’s efficacy in treating the coronavirus. If the trials prove remdesivir works, China could roll out the treatment more quickly than the usual deployment of new drugs due to the critical need among patients.
But it faces a potential hurdle over intellectual property control of the therapy, which was originally developed to treat other coronaviruses like SARS and has also been tested on Ebola.
At the Tuesday briefing, He Zhimin, vice head of National Intellectual Property Administration, said that China has not yet granted the full patent protection Gilead wants over the drug.
Gilead has filed eight patent applications for remdesivir in China, seeking protection over the compound’s structure, manufacturing method and usage. Only three of them have been licensed, while the other five are still under review, He said, without elaborating.