TASS, December 14. British doctors questioned the decision of the World Health Organization (WHO) to remove remdesivir from the list of approved drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. With this drug, they protected a patient who was suffering from a rare form of hereditary immunodeficiency. Research published scientific journal Nature Communications.
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“The unusual illness of our patient has provided a rare opportunity to directly assess the effectiveness of remdesivir against coronavirus infection. The pronounced response to treatment suggests that this drug is effective for at least some patients,” noted one of the authors of the work, immunologist from the University of Cambridge (UK) Nicholas Matheson.
Creating drugs from scratch often takes many years, so since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, scientists have been trying to find out if existing and approved drugs can be used against this disease. Their research has shown that some drugs for hepatitis C and Ebola can slow the multiplication of the new type of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).
Among these drugs was remdesivir, an experimental American drug originally developed to treat hepatitis and Ebola. Back in late spring, it began to be massively used to treat COVID-19. This October WHO removed remdesivir from the list of recommended drugs against coronavirus infection, since several clinical trials have indicated that it does not protect carriers of coronavirus from death.
In an effort to protect a patient with a rare form of immunodeficiency from dying after being infected with the coronavirus, Matheson and his colleagues presented arguments to the contrary.
Their charge, a thirty-year-old man from Pakistan, suffered from Bruton’s disease – one of the variants of immunodeficiency, which causes a mutation in the BTK gene. This gene plays an important role in the maturation of blood B cells, which are responsible for the production of antibodies. Accordingly, if the BTK gene is damaged in a carrier of the disease, then his body will not be able to independently form acquired immunity to bacteria and viruses.
This trait unusually influenced the development of COVID-19 in patient Matheson and colleagues. On the one hand, the infection remained in his body for an unusually long time, more than a month and a half. On the other hand, it did not spread beyond his lungs and did not cause blood clots, inflammation and other characteristic manifestations of this disease.
At first, British doctors tried to suppress the virus with the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin, but this proved to be useless. After that, the scientists used remdesivir. After that, his condition began to improve approximately on the second day after the start of treatment: the patient was able to breathe on his own, nausea and digestive problems disappeared.
After nine days of such treatment, the man was discharged from the hospital. However, literally two weeks later, he contracted COVID-19 again. Remdesivir helped to cope with the disease a second time. This confirmed that the drug actually interferes with the multiplication of coronavirus in human and animal cells.
“The fact that our patient could not fight the disease on his own suggests that antibodies play an important role in neutralizing SARS-CoV-2. At the same time, the absence of such antibodies could play a positive role: to protect the patient from the more severe consequences of the development of COVID- 19 associated with inflammation. All this suggests that when treating coronavirus infection for each patient, it is necessary to take into account what causes the symptoms – the virus or his own immunity “, – summed up another study author, immunologist from University College London (UK) Matthew Buckland.
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