LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - An anitiviral medicine produced by Gilead Sciences of the US has had positive results on patients with extreme forms of Covid-19, raising hopes that a treatment for the disease could be close.
A Chicago hospital treating patients with severe Covid-19 with Gilead's remdesivir medicine has found rapid recoveries from fever and respiratory symptoms with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, according to a report in Stat, a medical publication.

Remdesivir was one of the first treatments that promised to thwart Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. The University of Chicago Medicine gave 125 people with Covid-19 daily doses of remdesivir, of whom 113 had severe symptoms, Stat said. The treatment has not been approved for use anywhere in the world.

"The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We've only had two patients perish," Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the studies, said in a video passed to Stat.

The results could have global implications if a treatment for Covid-19 is approved quickly, allowing economies to reopen and potentially saving many lives. Share indexes rose despite grim economic data from China partly on hopes that a cure for the coronavirus might be imminent. The FTSE 100 was up 2.6% at 5777 at 09:28 BST and US stock futures rose ahead of markets opening.

Mullane said she was cautious about the results, partly because there was no placebo group, but that patients had come off ventilators a day after starting treatment and had left hospital after six days. She indicated that data for the first 400 patients in trials would be released within days. Gilead said on 10 April it expected to have preliminary data from the study of severe cases at the end of April.

Gilead told Stat: "What we can say at this stage is that we look forward to data from ongoing studies becoming available."

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