Russia will begin administering its first approved drug to treat covid-19 to patients next week, its public sponsor told Reuters, a move he hopes will ease tensions on the fitness formula and accelerate the return to mainstream economic life.
Russian hospitals can start administering the antiviral drug, registered as Avifavir, to patients from June 11, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund RDIF told Reuters in an interview. He said the company with the drug would produce enough to treat about 60,000 more people a month.
Lately there is no vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and human trials of several existing antiviral drugs have still proven their effectiveness.
A new antiviral drug from Gilead called remdesivir has shown promise in small efficacy trials against COVID-19 and is being administered to patients through some countries’ compassionate or emergency use rules.
Avifavir, known generically as favipiravir, first evolved in the late 1990s through a Japanese company acquired through Fujifilm as it moved into healthcare.
RDIF leader Kirill Dmitriev said Russian scientists had changed the drug for him and said Moscow could percentage of the main points of those changes within two weeks.
Japan tested the same drug, known as Avigan. It won applause from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and $128 million in funding, but has yet to be approved for use.
Avifavir appeared Saturday on a Russian government list of approved drugs.
ACCELERATED PROCESS
Dmitriev said clinical trials of the drug were conducted on another 330 people and showed it effectively treats the virus in up to four days.
The trials were expected to conclude in about a week, he said, however, the fitness ministry had approved the use of the drug under a special accelerated procedure and production began in March.
Clinical trials to verify the effectiveness of drugs usually take several months, even when accelerated, and involve a large number of randomly assigned patients who obtain the drug being tested, or a placebo.
Success in the first small-scale trials does not guarantee good fortune in later more comprehensive trials.
An article published this month, for example, linked the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which U. S. President Donald Trump says he took and suggested others use, to an increased threat of death in hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
Dmitriev said Russia was able to reduce testing times because the Japanese generic drug on which Avifavir is based was first registered in 2014 and underwent extensive testing before Russian specialists replaced it.
“We think it’s a game changer. This will decrease the strain on the fitness system, we will have fewer people in critical condition,” Dmitriev said. “We believe that the drug is imperative to resume full economic activity in Russia. “. “
With 414,878 cases, Russia has the third-highest number of infections in the world after Brazil and the United States, but has a low official death toll of 4,855, which has been the subject of debate.
RDIF, which owns a 50 percent stake in drug maker ChemRar, funded the trials and other work with its partners for about three hundred million rubles ($4. 3 million), Dmitriev said, explaining that prices for Russia were much lower. . due to past progression paintings in Japan.
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