Covid Science: Gilead's remdesivir fails to show benefit in European trial; no fetus risk seen with first trimester vaccination

ONO PHARMACEUTICAL

04/04/2022 19:37

By Nancy Lapid
    April 4 (Reuters) - The following is a summary of some
recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants
further study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be
certified by peer review.

    Two promising drugs for COVID-19 fail to deliver
    Two drugs that looked like promising treatments for COVID-19
in preliminary studies - remdesivir for hospitalized patients
and camostat for patients who are not seriously ill - failed to
show a benefit in those groups in randomized controlled trials,
researchers reported in two separate papers.
    In five European countries, researchers studied 843 COVID-19
patients who were hospitalized between March 2020 and January
2021 and who needed oxygen or machines to help with breathing.
Two week after patients had received either Gilead Sciences'
 GILD.O  antiviral remdesivir - sold as Veklury - plus standard
of care or standard of care alone for up to 10 days, there was
no difference between the groups in signs of improvement,
investigators reported on Thursday https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.30.22273206v1.
    In Japan between November 2020 and March 2021, researchers
randomly assigned 155 patients with mild or moderate COVID-19 to
receive the pancreatitis drug camostat mesylate from Ono
Pharmaceutical Co  4528.T  or a placebo for up to 14 days.    
Camostat blocks an enzyme that helps some versions of the
coronavirus infect cells - including the variants circulating at
the time of the study - but did not help patients get rid of the
virus in their airways any faster than placebo, the Japanese
researchers reported on Saturday https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.27.22271988v1.
 They said the results "highlight... the necessity of conducting
well-designed studies to confirm whether preclinical findings
translate into meaningful clinical efficacy." Both studies were
posted on medRxiv ahead of peer review.
     
    COVID-19 vaccines in first trimester of pregnancy appear
safe
    COVID-19 vaccination during the first trimester of pregnancy
does not increase the risk for congenital defects in the fetus,
preliminary data suggest.
    Researchers at Northwestern University Feinberg School of
Medicine in Chicago studied 1,149 women who received at least
one dose of a vaccine from Moderna  MRNA.O , Pfizer
 PFE.N /BioNTech  22UAy.DE  or Johnson & Johnson  JNN.N  between
30 days before conception and 14 weeks into gestation, which is
when the fetus is most vulnerable to developing birth defects
due to medications taken by the mother. Compared to 2,007
pregnant women who either remained unvaccinated or were
vaccinated later, women vaccinated shortly before or early in
pregnancy were not at higher risk for having an abnormality in
the fetus detected by their doctors on an ultrasound exam,
according to a report published on Monday in JAMA Pediatrics https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2790805.
    The authors acknowledge that examining a fetus with
ultrasonography is not as reliable as examining an infant, and
because many of the women they studied are still pregnant, real
proof of vaccination safety in the first trimester requires
larger studies of newborns. 
    
    SARS-CoV-2 infects eye cells in test tubes
    The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can infect the
vision-processing cells of the eye and reproduce there, lab
experiments suggest.
    Researchers used human cells in test tubes to grow a
miniaturized, simplified version of the retina - the nerve
tissue at the back of the eye that receives images and sends
them as electric signals to the brain. When the researchers
exposed these "organoids" to SARS-CoV-2, the virus infected a
variety of retinal nerve cells that perform different functions.
Furthermore, the virus could make copies of itself in those
cells, the researchers reported in the journal Stem Cell Reports
https://www.cell.com/stem-cell-reports/fulltext/S2213-6711(22)00104-7.
 In the infected organoids, genes that increase levels of
inflammatory proteins associated with retinal damage were more
active, the researchers also found. They also found that younger
retinal cells were more vulnerable to the virus, possibly
because younger cells have more of the protein on their surfaces
that the virus uses as a gateway for entry.
    Antibodies that block those gateways and make it harder for
the virus to infect cells appeared to protect the retinal
organoids, further experiments showed. The findings suggest that
the persistent syndrome known as long COVID may also include
retinal problems, researchers said.

    Click for a Reuters graphic https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl on
vaccines in development.

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Tracking the vaccine race    http://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/VACCINE-TRACKER/xegpbqnlovq/
COVID-19 vaccination tracker    https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/vaccination-rollout-and-access/
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 (Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
 ((Nancy.Lapid@thomsonreuters.com))