‘Very promising’ new treatment for COVID-19. KU Med Center seeks people to test it
Right now, if you test positive for COVID-19 and aren’t sick enough to be hospitalized, you’re stuck at home with no remedy. Though doctors are having some success treating hospitalized patients, there is no clinically proven treatment for COVID-19 outpatients.
The University of Kansas Medical Center has launched a clinical trial to find one, and it needs people who have tested positive for COVID-19.
The study is part of a nationwide clinical trial series called Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines, or ACTIV-2, announced by the National Institutes of Health this spring.
KU, one of about 40 sites participating, will study an experimental antibody developed by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co.
They’re called monoclonal antibodies and are made-in-a-laboratory versions of proteins the body’s immune system produces to fight off viruses and disease-causing pathogens. This antibody was isolated from the blood sample of a recovered COVID-19 patient.
Participants will receive a one-time intravenous infusion that will take about 60 minutes, the KU site’s lead investigator Dr. Mario Castro said during a Tuesday media briefing.
Some participants will receive the treatment, and others will receive a placebo, said Castro, KU Med’s vice chair for clinical and translational research.
“So you have a flip of the coin that you may get a placebo as part of this,” he said. “But the nice thing is instead of staying at home and not doing anything, which is pretty much what we tell our patients with (COVID-19) … you could come in and participate in the study and help us advance really our knowledge about what’s out there potentially as a new treatment.”
Researchers hope the treatment will reduce symptoms and how long people are sick. Effects of COVID-19 can linger for months. Castro said earlier trial results “look very promising.”
“If we could have a therapy that could lessen the length of that illness, it would be very powerful,” Castro said in the medical center’s announcement of the trial.
Outpatient treatments are critical for keeping people out of the hospital and preventing long-term complications and death, the trial’s co-investigator Dr. Leslie Spikes, assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at KU’s School of Medicine, said in the statement.
KU needs participants who are within 10 days of the onset of symptoms and within seven days of a positive COVID-19 test.
Anyone with active symptoms who would like to participate can call study coordinator, Luigi Boccardi, at 913-588-4022. The University of Kansas Health System will help recruit participants through its clinics, too.
The study is one of three COVID-19 clinical trials KU is involved with.
It had begun a trial for an AstraZeneca vaccine when the work was halted after a female trial participant in the United Kingdom suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of transverse myelitis, a serious spinal inflammatory disorder.
British health officials who halted the study have since allowed it to resume.
But the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t yet allowed trials in the United States to start up again. KU, working with Children’s Mercy, is one of 62 trial locations in the country. Local researchers will need 1,250 local volunteers for that trial.
Castro said Tuesday that he’s hoping the trial can resume “maybe this week.”
This story was originally published September 22, 2020 at 4:18 PM.
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