Kevzara works on severe patients
Treating critically ill COVID-19 patients with either of two rheumatoid arthritis drugs significantly improves survival rates and shortens the time patients need intensive care, trial results show. The drugs - tocilizumab, sold as Actemra by Roche , and Kevzara (sarilumab) from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Sanofi - reduced death rates by 8.5 percentage points among critically ill patients. That means that for every 12 patients treated with one of the drugs, one life would be saved, said Dr. Anthony Gordon of Imperial College London, coauthor of a report posted on Thursday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. The data, from 803 severely ill patients, showed that the drugs, which suppress the body's immune response, reduced mortality rates from 35.8% in a control group to 27.3% among patients receiving either drug. Previous studies had found no clear benefit from these drugs, but they included less severely ill patients treated at different stages in the disease. "A crucial difference," Gordon said, "may be that in our study, critically ill patients were enrolled within 24 hours" of when their organs started to fail, which suggests the sickest patients may gain the most benefit from these drugs. (https://bit.ly/2LshaaX)
Also demonstrates that US trails aren’t being run properly. |
