After receiving an experimental drug used to treat HIV and breast cancer, two coronavirus patients in New York City have been taken off ventilators and are out of intensive care according to reports.
The World Health organization, Private and corporate pharmaceutical companies all over the world are fighting day and night to develop the right vaccine to tackle Coronavirus that has killed thousands globally, but while the search goes on, doctors are using specific drugs already in the market that could help fight the virus.
According to a report by Daily Mail UK, the drug, leronlimab used to treat Breast cancer and HIV, was delivered by injection twice in the abdomen to seven critically ill coronavirus patients, and out of the seven, two were removed from ventilators and two showed significant improvement.
According to the report not yet approved by the WHO or FDA, studies suggest that leronlimab calms the overly aggressive immune response — known as a cytokine storm — that frequently leads to lung inflammation, pneumonia and potentially death of coronavirus patients.
A doctor running the drug trial told the company, CytoDyn, that if it continues to show promise, it could get emergency approval by the FDA as soon as possible.
For the first patient, a person in their 70s, improvements came almost immediately and all but one patient showed recovery.
‘One of [the patients] self-extubating,’ meaning they removed their own ventilator tube, ‘and was alert an hour or two after treatment,’ CytoDyn president Dr Nader Pourhassan told DailyMail.com.
‘The doctor said that this patient, in the last three days before treatment, was intubated and extubated and every time they intubated him, within four to six hours they immediately had to intubate him again.’
‘CytoDyn is set to give the drug to another 75 patients with mild or moderate coronavirus, and if they, like the first set of patients, show signs that ‘the cytokine storm goes down and the patient is not having a problem clearing the virus…it could get FDA-approval very quickly,’ said Dr Pourhassan.
