According to an April 15 statement on the ClinicalTrials website of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, trials have been postponed because “no eligible patient can be recruited.”
Fox News contacted remdesivir developer Gilead Sciences with a request for comment on this story.
China, which recently reopened the city of Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic, reported a particularly higher number of coronavirus cases on Friday than the last 4 days, adding 358 cases to bring its total to 83760 to April 17.
GILEAD OFFERS UPDATE ON EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENT OF CORONAVIRUS
During the last 4 days, the number of new instances in China ranged from 48 in the low to 90 in the high end. Last March, scientists warned of a “second wave” if Wuhan ended his policy of social estrangement too soon.
China reopened Wuhan on April 7, Fox News reported in the past.
The country also recently revised the death toll in Wuhan City. As of April 16, the death toll was 3,346, but increased to 4,636 on Friday morning, an increase of about 39%.
U.S. lawmakers in either aisle have accused China of failing to report the number of cases in the country.
On Thursday, the STAT fitness news site reported that the experimental drug promises in a clinical trial in Chicago.
STAT reported that patients in the Phase III trial experienced recovery from fever and respiratory symptoms. Almost all patients were discharged in less than a week, he said.
A spokeswoman for the University of Chicago School of Medicine said it’s not worth reaching any conclusions. “Partial knowledge of an ongoing clinical trial is by definition incomplete and deserves never to be used to draw conclusions about the protection or effectiveness of a possible remedy under investigation,” the spokeswoman told Fox News in an email. “In this case, data from an internal forum for fellow researchers related to the paintings in process were disseminated without authorization. Drawing conclusions at this level is inappropriate and scientifically incorrect.”
A Gilead spokeswoman echoed the same sentiments. “Anecdotal, while encouraging, reports do not provide the statistical strength to determine the protection and efficacy profile of remedivir as a remedy for COVID-19,” Fox News said in an email. “We hope that knowledge of our Phase 3 test in patients with severe COVID-19 infection will be available until the end of this month, and that more knowledge will be gained from other studies in May.”
However, investors responded definitively to the report, causing Gilead’s shares to rise more than 8% early Friday.
The report arrives less than a week after small studies found that remdesivir looks promising in the war against the coronavirus epidemic.
The study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was endorsed by Gilead Sciences.
Remdesivir is still awaiting regulatory approval as a remedy for coronavirus.
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As of Friday morning, more than 2.1 million cases of coronavirus had been diagnosed worldwide, adding more than 671,000 in the United States, the most affected country in the world.
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Fox Business R.N. James Rogers and Frank Miles of White and Fox News contributed to this article.