Gilead Halts Emergency Access To Remdesivir Amid Surging Demand; Scientists Identify 69 Drugs That Might Work

Reuters: Gilead Puts Emergency Access To Experimental Coronavirus Drug On Hold Amid Surging Demand
Gilead Sciences Inc said on Sunday it was temporarily putting new emergency access to its experimental coronavirus drug remdesivir on hold due to overwhelming demand and that it wanted most people receiving the drug to participate in a clinical trial to prove if it is safe and effective. The drugmaker said in a statement there had been an exponential increase in so-called compassionate-use requests for the drug. The spread of the virus in Europe and the United States has “flooded an emergency treatment access system that was set up for very limited access to investigational medicines and never intended for use in response to a pandemic,” it said. (3/22)

Stat: Gilead Suspends Access To Experimental Covid-19 Drug Remdesivir 
Remdesivir is being studied in five large clinical trials, two of which could read out results in early April. Up until now, Gilead has made it possible for patients who want the drug to get it through a process called “compassionate use.” To date, the company said, it has provided emergency access to several hundred patients in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The company said in its statement that “enrollment in clinical trials is the primary way to access remdesivir to generate critical data that inform the appropriate use of this investigational medicine.” (Herper, 3/22)

NPR: Might The Experimental Drug Remdesivir Work Against COVID-19?
With a coronavirus vaccine at least a year away, some scientists are investigating existing medicines and compounds that might work as effective treatments. A drug called remdesivir is now in the spotlight, but health professionals, and scientists say it's too soon to know if it really works against COVID-19. Remdesivir is an antiviral, intravenous medicine made by Gilead Sciences that's been around for years as an experimental compound, but was never approved by the Food and Drug Administration — or any other country's drug approval agency. (Lupkin, 3/21)

The New York Times: Scientists Identify 69 Drugs To Test Against The Coronavirus
Nearly 70 drugs and experimental compounds may be effective in treating the coronavirus, a team of researchers reported on Sunday night. Some of the medications are already used to treat other diseases, and repurposing them to treat Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, may be faster than trying to invent a new antiviral from scratch, the scientists said. The list of drug candidates appeared in a study published on the web site bioRxiv. The researchers have submitted the paper to a journal for publication. (Zimmer, 3/22)

Stat: Why Trump Is At Odds With His Medical Experts Over Covid-19 Drugs 
One of the most wrenching questions in medicine has been playing out to garish effect in White House press conferences. The question is this: In an emergency, like the exploding pandemic of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, how much data should doctors require before they use a medicine? President Donald Trump has made clear that he thinks two old malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, should be deployed quickly against the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. But his own lieutenants, the heads of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have been hesitant. (Herper, 3/22)

CNN: Fauci Says 'There Isn't, Fundamentally, A Difference' Between His View, Trump's On Coronavirus 
The nation's top infectious disease expert said Sunday that "there isn't, fundamentally, a difference" between his view and President Donald Trump's when it comes to combatting coronavirus, saying Trump just approaches fighting the pandemic from a "hope, layperson standpoint" while he approaches it from a scientific one. Dr. Anthony Fauci, in an interview on CBS' Margaret Brennan on "Face the Nation," was asked about his difference in medical opinion with Trump -- that a combination of two drugs, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, could possibly help with treating coronavirus -- and whether he was concerned such drugs could become over-prescribed, potentially leading to a shortage for those who need them. (Robertson, 3/22)

ProPublica: Lupus Patients Can’t Get Crucial Medication After President Trump Pushes Unproven Coronavirus Treatment
The drug Plaquenil keeps Anna Valdez’s lupus in check. Late last week, as she sheltered in place at her home outside Santa Rosa, California, Valdez called her local pharmacy and ordered a refill to treat her autoimmune disorder, thinking a 90-day supply would help her ride out the coronavirus outbreak. But the pharmacy told her it had only 10 pills left. Valdez called other pharmacies. They, too, had run out. (Ornstein, 3/22)

WBUR: Hoarding Of Malaria Drug Under Investigation As Potential COVID-19 Treatment Undermines Public Health Efforts, Doctors Say
Doctors say the hoarding of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that may or may not be effective in preventing or treating the coronavirus, is unethical. (Bebinger, 3/22)

CNN: Nigeria Records Chloroquine Poisoning After Trump Endorses It For Coronavirus Treatment
Health officials in Nigeria have issued a warning over chloroquine after they said three people in the country overdosed on the drug, in the wake of President Trump's comments about using it to treat coronavirus. A Lagos state official told CNN that three people were hospitalized in the city after taking the drug. Officials later issued a statement cautioning against using chloroquine for Covid-19 treatment. (Busari and Adebayo, 3/23)

Stat: AbbVie To Allow Generic Copies Of HIV Pill In Israel After Government License
After the Israeli government approved licensing for a generic copy of the Kaletra HIV pill to combat the coronavirus, AbbVie (ABBV) agreed to allow the country to purchase copycat versions of its medicine from suppliers in other countries, an unusual instance in which the threat of a compulsory license prompted a drug maker to widen access. The move came after the Israeli Justice Ministry reportedly explained AbbVie was unable to supply enough of the pill and planned to import generic substitutes from countries where the patent had already expired, even though a study published this week showed no benefit in fighting Covid-19. The AbbVie patent in Israel reportedly expires in 2024. This is the first time the government allowed the use of a generic version of a patent-protected drug. (Silverman, 3/20)

Los Angeles Times: Coronavirus Drugs: Where We Are And What We Know
Medicines designed to treat COVID-19 won’t be on pharmacy shelves for months or even years, but thousands of patients are in hospitals and health clinics now. So doctors are looking to drugs that are already approved for treating other diseases. Malaria, HIV and arthritis wouldn’t seem to have much in common with SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that has upended the world in just a few short months. But medicines developed for those ailments are showing some promise against the respiratory illness at the center of the pandemic. (Khan, 3/21)

Meanwhile, in vaccine research news —

CNN: The World's Fastest Supercomputer Identified Chemicals That Could Stop Coronavirus From Spreading, A Crucial Step Toward A Treatment 
The novel coronavirus presents an unprecedented challenge for scientists: The speed at which the virus spreads means they must accelerate their research. But this is what the world's fastest supercomputer was built for. Summit, IBM's supercomputer equipped with the "brain of AI," ran thousands of simulations to analyze which drug compounds might effectively stop the virus from infecting host cells. The supercomputer identified 77 of them. (Andrew, 3/20)

The Wall Street Journal: In Bid For Coronavirus Vaccine, U.S. Eases Access To Supercomputers
The U.S. government, International Business Machines Corp. and others are giving researchers world-wide access to at least 16 supercomputers to help speed the discovery of vaccines and drugs to combat the novel coronavirus. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Sunday announced the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a partnership that includes IBM, the Energy Department national laboratories, Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud, Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp. and others. (Castellanos, 3/22)

Boston Globe: Drug Company Seeks Boston Blood Donors Who Have Recovered From Coronavirus 
In an urgent effort to develop a potential vaccine and medicine for COVID-19, a San Francisco drug company on Friday asked residents of Boston and five other US hot spots in the coronavirus epidemic to donate blood if they have recovered from the disease. Vir Biotechnology wants blood samples from a total of 100 donors in the hopes of isolating antibodies that could be used to make a vaccine and treatment. Such antibodies are produced by the body’s immune system. (Saltzman, 3/20)

Los Angeles Times: How The Blood Of Coronavirus Survivors May Protect Others From COVID-19
As U.S. scientists race to stave off a tidal wave of COVID-19 patients, they are showing renewed interest in a little-known medicine with ancient roots and many modern applications: convalescent plasma. It’s medicine now coursing through the veins of at least 86,690 people in China and elsewhere, all of whom have joined a fraternity of potentially powerful healers. These are people who have been infected with the novel coronavirus and survived. (Healy, 3/20)