Dive Brief:
- The U.K. health service will make available Gilead's experimental antiviral drug remdesivir for emergency use in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
- Doctors in the National Health Service will be able to prescribe the treatment to adults and adolescents with severe cases of the disease who meet certain clinical criteria, according to a May 26 statement.
- U.K. regulators considered studies conducted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as well as by Gilead, which suggested the medicine can hasten the time to recovery by about four days.
Dive Insight:
Remdesivir has vaulted into the spotlight as the world tries to counter the novel coronavirus that has infected at least 5.6 million people and killed more than 350,000 globally. The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the drug for emergency use based on the NIH trial, and Japanese regulators gave it an exceptional approval as well.
Now, the focus is turning to supply. In the U.K., the medicine will only be given to patients who are judged most likely to benefit because of a limited amount of treatment courses on hand. The U.K. government will work with Gilead to supply the drug, the statement said.
Gilead has pledged to donate its entire inventory of 1.5 million doses and is rushing to make more, planning to spend as much as $1 billion this year on developing and manufacturing the medicine. But demand is likely to quickly outstrip supply, at least over the next several months.
The U.S. government expects to get about 940,000 of the donated doses, STAT reported earlier this month. And access could become an international issue as governments seek to secure treatment for their own citizens.
Already, French drugmaker Sanofi provoked outrage in its home country when CEO Paul Hudson told Bloomberg that Americans would have first access on a vaccine because of U.S. investment in its development — a position the pharma has since walked back. AstraZeneca, meanwhile, plans to prioritize U.K. patients if it's successful in developing a treatment to ward off the virus that causes COVID-19 disease.
The U.K.'s outbreak is now the worst in Europe, according to statistics kept by Johns Hopkins University. It's had about 266,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 37,000 deaths through May 27, surpassing Italy, France and Spain.