Covid-19 roundup: Re­gen­eron, Sanofi launch coro­n­avirus pro­gram; NIH staffer tests pos­i­tive for coro­n­avirus, Mod­er­na vac­cine tri­al starts

In oth­er in­dus­try-re­lat­ed pan­dem­ic news:

— Re­gen­eron and Sanofi re­port­ed to­day that they have launched a clin­i­cal pro­gram to test their IL-6 drug Kevzara on hos­pi­tal­ized Covid-19 pa­tients. The com­pa­nies re­port that they’ve al­ready seen proof-of-con­cept da­ta from a study of an­oth­er IL-6 drug in Chi­na. The an­ti-in­flam­ma­to­ry drug has the po­ten­tial to lessen the dam­age the coro­n­avirus can in­flict on pa­tients’ lungs, which can be rav­aged in the re­ac­tion to the new virus. They plan to start a 400-pa­tient study in New York, work­ing with hos­pi­tal­ized pa­tients. The tri­al will run in 2 parts, with the first part fo­cused on the­drug’s abil­i­ty to re­duce the need for sup­ple­men­tal oxy­gen and the sec­ond fo­cused on the drug’s abil­i­ty to re­duce hos­pi­tal­iza­tion, me­chan­i­cal ven­ti­la­tion and death. “To ini­ti­ate this tri­al quick­ly, so that the re­sults may in­form ev­i­dence-based treat­ment of this on­go­ing pan­dem­ic, Re­gen­eron and Sanofi have worked close­ly with the U.S. Food and Drug Ad­min­is­tra­tion and the Bio­med­ical Ad­vanced Re­search and De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty, al­so known as the FDA and BAR­DA,” said George Yan­copou­los, Re­gen­eron’s CSO.

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