A Pill to Treat Covid-19? The U.S. Is Betting on It.
Source: New York Times
The U.S. government will invest $3.2 billion to develop antiviral pills for Covid-19, the Department of Health and Human Services announced on Thursday. Such a treatment could keep people out of the hospital and potentially save many lives in the years to come, as the virus becomes a perennial threat despite the distribution of effective vaccines. A number of other viruses, including influenza, H.I.V. and hepatitis C, can be treated with a simple pill.
But despite more than a year of research, no such drug exists for the coronavirus. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s program for accelerating Covid-19 research, invested far more money in the development of vaccines than of treatments, a gap that the new program will try to fill. The new influx of money will speed up the clinical trials of a few promising drug candidates. If all goes well, some of those pills might become available by the end of this year. The Antiviral Program for Pandemics will also support research on entirely new drugs — not just for the coronavirus, but for viruses that could cause future pandemics.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. “I wake up in the morning, I don’t feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview. “I call up my doctor and I say, ‘I have Covid and I need a prescription.’”
Dr. Fauci’s support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., “protease inhibitors” that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime. In the early 2000s, researchers found that an antiviral called sofosbuvir could cure hepatitis C close to 100 percent of the time. Tamiflu, an over-the-counter pill for influenza, can cut the time it takes to recover from an infection, and reduce the chances that a bout of the flu will land someone in the hospital.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/health/covid-pill-antiviral.html
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