Washington, USA
The US is
fast-tracking antimalarial drugs for use as a treatment against the new
coronavirus, President Donald Trump said Thursday, following encouraging early
results in France and China.
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| US President Donald Trump listens to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn (R) speak on the latest developments of the coronavirus outbreak |
Chloroquine and
hydroxychloroquine have not been given a formal green light in the US to fight
the pandemic, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it would work
with domestic makers to expand production as it studied their efficacy.
The news came as Senate
Republicans unveiled a $1 trillion emergency relief package to combat the
economic turmoil caused by the virus -- which must now be examined by so-far
skeptical Democrats, who want to include direct financial aid to individuals,
before a date can be set for a vote.
The two drugs mentioned Thursday
are already approved for malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and
doctors in the US may prescribe any drug they believe is appropriate medically.
"We're going to be able to
make that drug available almost immediately, and that's where the FDA has been
so great," Trump told reporters, referring to both compounds.
The US has recorded more than
14,000 cases of new coronavirus infection, 205 of them fatal, according to a
Johns Hopkins University tracker. But authorities expect the number to rise
steeply in the coming days because of increased levels of testing after initial
delays.
"If there is an experimental
drug that is potentially available, a doctor could ask for that drug to be used
in a patient. We have criteria for that and very speedy approval for
that," said FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn.
"As an example, many
Americans have read studies and heard media reports about this drug
chloroquine, which is an anti-malarial drug.
"That's a drug that the
president directed us to take a closer look at, as to whether an expanded use
approach to that could be done to actually see if that benefits patients."
Chloroquine and
hydroxychloroquine are synthetic forms of quinine, which is found in the barks
of cinchona trees of Latin America and has been used to treat malaria for
centuries.
Some in the wider scientific
community have cautioned more research is needed to prove that they really
work and are safe for COVID-19.
But French drug maker Sanofi said
on Wednesday it was ready to offer the French government millions of doses of
hydroxychloroquine, sold under its brand name Plaquenil, in light of a
"promising" study carried out by scientist Didier Raoult of the IHU
Mediterranee Infection in Marseille.
Raoult reported this week that
after treating 24 patients for six days with Plaquenil, the virus had
disappeared in all but a quarter of them.
The research has not yet been
peer reviewed or published, and Raoult had come under fire by some scientists
and officials in his native France for potentially raising false hopes.
"I'm just doing my duty, and
I am happy to see that now eight or nine countries recommend chloroquine
treatment for patients with this new coronavirus," he told AFP.
Encouraging
Several clinical trials are also
underway in China, where authorities have announced positive results but not
yet published their data.
Karine Le Roch, a professor of
cell biology at the University of California, Riverside told AFP she was
encouraged by recent work in France and China.
"I will say there is a very
small number of patients, but if the results are correct, it seems to indeed decrease
the viral loads of infected patients," she said.
"It's encouraging but we
have to make sure the results are accurate and then confirm that with a larger
number of patients."
Scientists understand how these
alkaloid compounds work at the cellular level to fight malaria parasites -- but
it's not yet known how they are fighting the coronavirus, Le Roch added.
"It's highly possible that
this compound is changing the acidity of the cells infected with the
virus," she told AFP.
"And then the enzymes that
are needed for the virus to replicate cannot work as efficiently as they would
work without the drug."
But not everyone is convinced.
Writing in the journal Antiviral
Research, French scientists Franck Touret and Xavierde de Lamballerie urged
caution, noting that chloroquine had been proposed several times for the
treatment of acute viral diseases in humans without success, including HIV.
They added that finding the right
dose was crucial because "chloroquine poisoning has been associated with
cardiovascular disorders that can be life-threatening."
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