April 30, 2020

remdesivir preliminary trial results

Last night, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US issued a statement claiming that hospitalised patients with advanced Covid-19 who received remdesivir recovered faster than similar patients who received a placebo, according to preliminary data from an RCT.  The Medical Research Council’s (MRC) clinical trials unit is running the EU arm of this trial and the SMC invited the scientists involved to talk about these preliminary results and answer journalist’s questions.

Speakers included:

Prof Mahesh Parmar, Director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL

Prof Abdel Babiker, Professor of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL and co-lead for this study

Prof Brian Angus, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine and Global Health, and study site PI at the Churchill Hospital

Two SMC Roundups on the results from this trial were also issued here and here.