February 9, 2023 – Results from a Phase III trial of a brand new COVID-19 treatment showed it reduced the chance of hospitalization or long emergency room visits by half.
“The data look quite promising, and other treatments have fallen by the wayside,” said Dr. Paul Sax of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. USA todaySax was not involved within the research.
Most treatments for COVID-19 have turn out to be ineffective because the virus has evolved, leaving only just a few antiviral agents resembling Paxlovid as treatment options.
The latest drug is named pegylated interferon lambda and is manufactured by the Californian company Eiger BioPharmaceutical. It is run as a single injection.
The study was published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers evaluated the treatment compared with placebo in 1,949 adults in Canada and Brazil who were at high risk for severe COVID-19 disease. People within the treatment group received the vaccine inside 7 days of symptom onset.
The treatment worked best when given inside 3 days of symptom onset. The results also showed that it was effective in each vaccinated and unvaccinated people, in addition to against different COVID variants.
“Peginterferon lambda has tremendous therapeutic potential, and we continue to see the emergence of aggressive variants of the virus that are spreading around the world and are less sensitive to vaccines and antibody treatment,” said researcher Jordan Feld, MD, MPH, associate professor of drugs on the University of Toronto, in a Press release. “With some therapies, resistance due to variants or new strains of the virus could be a problem, but with peginterferon lambda this may not be a problem because its mechanism of action involves the activation of multiple virus-killing pathways.”
Eiger BioPharmaceutical said it has 100,000 doses in stock and is capable of manufacturing one other 10 million.
The New York Times reported that the corporate may seek approval for the treatment outside the United States because of FDA hurdles.
“Food and Drug Administration regulators notified the drug’s manufacturer, Eiger Biopharmaceuticals, late last year that they were not prepared to authorize it for emergency use,” the Just reported. “Eiger executives said part of the problem appears to be that the clinical trial did not include an American site, only sites in Brazil and Canada, and that it was initiated and led by academic researchers rather than the company itself.”