2024-01-23 00:13:54
A drug for a ‘flash’ recovery from Covid. It’s called simnotrelvir and it’s a new anti-Covid pill that has been shown to speed up recovery from the disease by about 1.5 days in mild-moderate cases, as certified by a study published in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’. The drug shortens the duration of symptoms and is sold in China, where it has emergency use authorization from early 2023, at a lower price than its main competitor. So much so that it is the most popular anti-Covid antiviral in the Asian giant (it costs about a quarter of Paxlovid, says one of the authors of the study). The new data, experts reflect, could push the authorities of other countries to approve the drug, probably after having carried out their own clinical studies.
The clinical trial published in Nejm revealed that simnotrelvir, which is administered in a cycle of pills, takes effect almost immediately after taking it, relieving fever, cough and runny nose, we also read in ‘Nature’ online. It’s “clearly a powerful drug. The result is clearly positive. And it’s welcome,” says Saye Khoo, an infectious disease pharmacologist at the University of Liverpool, UK. Early in the pandemic, antiviral drugs were tested largely on people at high risk of severe Covid. Even currently, the World Health Organization, as explained in Nature, recommends that only people belonging to high-risk groups take antivirals such as Paxlovid, the anti-Covid pill used in Italy, the USA and many other countries.
Now, however, the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus has “already become a routine respiratory virus in the general population,” says study co-author Bin Cao, a pulmonologist at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing. This is why he and his colleagues decided to test simnotrelvir especially on young people with standard risk levels. The researchers combined simnotrelvir with a component of Paxlovid, ritonavir, which limits the degradation of simnotrelvir. And they tested this combination on more than 600 people with an average age of 35, about half of whom had at least one risk factor (such as obesity). None of the study participants had a severe form of Covid. By the fifth day after treatment, Sars-CoV-2 levels in people who took the pill had decreased about 30 times more than in participants who took a placebo.
How the pill works
Simnotrelvir’s ability to speed recovery in standard-risk people is reminiscent of the antiviral ensitrelvir, which received conditional approval in Japan in November 2022. The downsides? They are similar to those of Paxlovid, including a bad taste and incompatibility with a number of common medications. Additionally, researchers asked study participants to begin treatment within 3 days of developing symptoms—a “challenging time window for testing and interventions,” Khoo notes.
As for expanding its use, experts point out that many doctors are currently still more concerned about preventing hospitalization and death in high-risk people. So they may want more information before changing their prescribing habits, says infectious disease specialist William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, USA.
“The conclusion – intervenes Khoo – is that we welcome every new drug, but none of these says the last word in terms of Covid antivirals”.
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