By Muhammad Luqman
US pharma firm, Gilead Sciences has said that it was in contact with drug manufacturing companies in Pakistan and India to start the production of anti-viral drug, remdesivir, believed to be the first ever anti-dote of COVID-19, according to English newspaper Daily Dawn.
Remdesivir is an experimental antiviral drug used to treat patients with the coronavirus and was recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Last month, Gilead said the drug had helped improve outcomes for patients with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and provided data suggesting it worked better when given earlier in the course of infection.
According to a statement by the company on its website, Gilead Sciences “is negotiating long-term voluntary licenses with several generic drugmakers in India and Pakistan to produce remdesivir for developing countries. Gilead will provide appropriate technology transfers to facilitate this production”.
The statement adds that the company’s goal “is to make remdesivir both accessible and affordable to governments and patients around the world” and it plans to continue the production of the drug for “Europe, Asia and the developing world through at least 2022”.
According to international media reports, a clinical trial of the drug remdesivir in the United States showed that patients recovered about 30 per cent faster than those on a placebo, in the first proof of successful treatment against the new disease.
“The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery,” Anthony Fauci, the top US epidemiologist who oversaw the study, told US media .
Fauci likened the finding to the first retrovirals that worked, albeit with modest success, against HIV in the 1980s.
However, remdesivir failed in trials against the Ebola virus and a smaller study, released last week by the World Health Organisation, found limited effects among patients in Wuhan, China, where the illness was first detected in December.
Gilead Sciences has also the development of ant-hepatitits drug Sovaldi to its credit that has been very effective in the treatment of the liver disease across the globe especially in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent.
