Coronavirus vaccine will take time, so researchers are hunting for and finding promising new COVID-19 tre – OregonLive

A vaccine is the ultimate goal in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, but its arrival is likely at least a year off, with that aggressive timeline being called a moonshot by one pharmaceutical company.

In the meantime, researchers are working to identify meaningful treatment options for patients with COVID-19, the deadly respiratory illness caused by the virus. And some early experiments and trials are encouraging.

For a much-needed dose of potential good news on the pandemic front, lets consider a handful of the many efforts underway to help COVID-19 patients.

Perhaps the best-known treatment being studied right now involves the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. President Donald Trump heralded it during a March 20 press conference. A few days later an Arizona man died after self-medicating with non-pharmaceutical chloroquine phosphate, leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to warn people not to take the substance to ward off coronavirus.

Despite this tragedy, hydroxychloroquine does indeed show promise in treating COVID-19, and doctors are already trying it out on patients.

Eight coronavirus patients at a veterans home in Lebanon, Oregon, for example, have been treated with hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin. The oldest of the patients, 104-year-old William Lapschies, appears to have fully recovered from the illness.

I was using it to give them a fighting chance, their doctor, Rob Richardson, told The Associated Press.

The Henry Ford Health System in Michigan announced last week that it is also treating some seriously ill COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine.

Early indications are that the drug reduces viral shedding, which help arrest the progression of COVID-19 in patients who are experiencing shortness of breath or who have developed pneumonia.

We are not using it in outpatients, and were not using it in patients with mild infection, Henry Ford infectious-disease specialist Dr. Marcus Zervos told reporters. We are using it, however, in patients who are sick enough to be hospitalized with pneumonia who we feel are at risk of progressing their infection.

University of Minnesota infectious-disease scientist David Bouware has begun a nationwide trial to determine if hydroxychloroquine could prevent people exposed to the coronavirus from developing COVID-19. The trial will have 1,500 participants.

Bouware says he is encouraged by the data, which indicates the drug might keep the coronavirus from entering cells, but he points out its early days.

Our goal, he said, is to find out, Does this actually work?

Preventing the progression of COVID-19 once someone is infected with the coronavirus is a key objective of medical researchers. The reason: So far, a significant percentage of the patients who have had to be put on ventilators have died.

In hopes of fewer severe cases reaching that point, researchers in Belgium have launched a clinical trial of the drug Leukine.

The study will use Leukine to treat 80 Covid-19 patients who are suffering from respiratory distress but not on ventilation. The goal is to try to prevent them from going to intensive care, Partner Therapeutics chief medical officer Dr. Debasish Roychowdhury told The Oregonian/OregonLive. Massachusetts-based Partner Therapeutics owns the rights for Leukine.

Earlier studies have shown that the drug, a yeast-derived version of GM-CSF, promotes lung repair. GM-CSF, or granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor, is an important protein the body makes and is critical for maintaining normal, healthy lungs, Roychowdhury pointed out.

Leukine has been around for 30 years and is currently being used to aid leukemia- and- bone-marrow-transplant patients.

The safety of the drug is very well-known, Roychowdhury said.

One of the worst-case scenarios for a COVID-19 patient is cytokine storm, when the immune system overreacts to the novel virus and floods the lungs with immune cells, causing severe inflammation. One possible way to keep those patients alive is through transfusions of plasma with COVID-19 antibodies from people who have recovered from the illness.

Five COVID-19 patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) at a hospital in Shenzhen, China, recently received such transfusions, a study posted to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported on March 27.

Though the sample size is quite small (and the critically ill patients were receiving various treatments, including antiviral medications, as part of all-out efforts to save them), the results are encouraging. All five of the patients receiving the transfusions were on ventilation when the treatment began. Following plasma transfusion, body temperature normalized within 3 days in 4 of 5 patients, the study states. A month after the transfusion, three of the five patients had been released from the hospital and the other two were in stable condition.

In another small experiment, doctors treated seven COVID-19 patients with mesenchymal stem cells, which are known for their peculiar and powerful immunoregulatory abilities. This treatment also showed promise. The pulmonary function and symptoms of these seven patients were significantly improved in 2 days after MSC transplantation, stated a study published in the journal Aging and Disease. Among them, two common and one severe patient were recovered and discharged in 10 days after treatment -- significantly faster than is typical for both moderate and severe cases.

Another drug being studied in the fight against COVID-19 is the anti-viral Remdesivir, which was developed for Ebola.

Remdesivir might stop the coronavirus from reproducing in the body. Northwestern Memorial Hospital infectious-disease specialist Dr. Babafemi Taiwo has called it a really special drug.

These and other treatments are in the very earliest stages of study, seeing as the novel coronavirus didnt exist in humans until late last year. It remains to be seen whether they will be effective and safe in large numbers of patients.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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Coronavirus vaccine will take time, so researchers are hunting for and finding promising new COVID-19 tre - OregonLive