Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved remdesivir (Veklury) today as a treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients age 12 and up, making it the first and only approved treatment for the disease, according to a release from drug manufacturer Gilead Sciences.
The FDA's initial Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the antiviral, issued in May, allowed the drug to be used only for patients with severe COVID-19 — specifically, COVID-19 patients with low blood oxygen levels or those who need oxygen therapy or mechanical ventilation.
An August EUA expanded treatment to include all adult and pediatric hospitalized COVID-19 patients, regardless of the severity of their disease. The FDA also issued a new EUA for remdesivir today allowing treatment of hospitalized pediatric patients younger than 12 weighing at least 3.5 kg.
Today's approval is based on three randomized controlled trials, according to Gilead.
Final trial results from one of them, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease-funded ACTT-1 trial, published earlier in October, showed that hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who received remdesivir had a shorter median recovery time than those who received a placebo — 10 days versus 15 days.
This difference and some related secondary endpoints were statistically significant in the randomized trial, but there was not a statistically significant difference in mortality between the treatment and placebo groups.
The other two trials used for the approval, the SIMPLE trials, were open-label Phase 3 trials conducted in countries with a high prevalence of COVID-19 infections, according to Gilead.
The SIMPLE-Severe trial was a randomized, multicenter study that evaluated the efficacy and safety of 5-day and 10-day dosing plus standard of care in 397 hospitalized adult patients with severe COVID-19. The primary endpoint was clinical status on Day 14 assessed on a 7-point ordinal scale, according to Gilead.
The trial found that a 5-day or a 10-day treatment course of Veklury achieved similar clinical outcomes to the ACTT-1 trial (odds ratio, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.51 to 1.12).
The SIMPLE-Moderate trial was a randomized, controlled, multicenter study that evaluated the efficacy and safety of 5-day and 10-day dosing durations of Veklury plus standard of care compared with standard of care alone in 600 hospitalized adult patients with moderate COVID-19, Gilead stated in its release.
The primary endpoint was clinical status on Day 11 assessed on a 7-point ordinal scale.
The results showed statistically improved clinical outcomes with a 5-day treatment course of Veklury compared with standard of care (odds ratio, 1.65; 95% CI, 1.09 to 2.48; P = .017), according to Gilead.
Ellie Kincaid is Medscape's associate managing editor. She has previously written about healthcare for Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Nature Medicine. She can be reached by email at ekincaid@medscape.net and on Twitter @ellie_kincaid.
Follow Medscape on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Here's how to send Medscape a story tip.
Cite this: Ellie Kincaid. FDA Approves Remdesivir, First Treatment for COVID-19 - Medscape - Oct 22, 2020.
Comments