Coronavirus: Drugs offer short-term hope for healing the sick until a vaccine can be found

New stopgap treatments are being identified for COVID-19 to cover the critical months before a vaccine is developed.

A US laboratory scientist cultures coronavirus to prepare for testing. Picture: AP

New stopgap treatments are being identified for COVID-19 to cover the critical months before a vaccine can be successfully tested and rushed into production.

A Japanese influenza drug is the latest to show therapeutic promise, achieving encouraging results on sick people in China.

This is in addition to the early success doctors in Brisbane have had pairing antiretrovirals developed to suppress HIV with the ­anti-malaria drug Chloroquine.

In the US, President Donald Trump has talked up the potential of Chloroquine, also licensed there to treat rheumatoid arthritis and the auto-immune disease lupus, as a “game changer” for coronavirus.

Pushing the US Food and Drug Administration to fast-track approvals for the drug to be used against COVID-19, the President said: “It’s been around for a long time so we know if things don’t go as planned it’s not going to kill anyone. We have to remove every barrier, or a lot of barriers that were unnecessary, and they’ve done that to get the rapid deployment of safe, effective treatments and we think we have some good answers.”

Tested on 340 Chinese patients in the hard-hit cities of Wuhan and Shenzhen, Japanese flu drug Favipiravir has been found to improve lung capacity in the infected and speed recovery. Those in the clinical trial tested negative to the virus after a median of four days, compared with 11 days for the control group, media reports said. Lung performance improved in 91 per cent of patients given the antiviral, a 50 per cent improvement on ­people who weren’t given the drug.

“It has a high degree of safety and is clearly effective in treatment,” said Zhang Xinmin of China’s Science and Technology Ministry. But Japanese scientists cautioned that Favipiravir had been most effective in COVID-19 patients with mild to moderate symptoms, suggesting its best use would be to prevent the virus ­multiplying and progressing to the severe stage.

Currently, those desperately ill with coronavirus are put into intensive care on respirators and in some cases heart-lung bypass ­machines. But conventional medicines can do little to arrest the disease once it progresses to a ­lethal form of viral pneumonia.

Some of the five Chinese tourists in a tour group from Wuhan who fell sick on Queensland’s Gold Coast in January were given the HIV drug lopinavir, usually used in combination with the booster agent ritonavir, prompting the Queensland government to establish a small stockpile of the first-generation antiretrovirals.

However, it too has been found by Japanese scientists to offer ­limited help to the severely ill, ­especially elderly people who are most at risk from COVID-19.

While scientists in Australia, the US, China, Europe and Israel are scrambling to develop vaccines, Scott Morrison has echoed the expert consensus that the preventative treatments won’t be ready for widescale use this year.

The Brisbane research team led by Professor David Paterson, of the University of Queensland, said this week the combination of Chloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir had made the virus “disappear” in laboratory tests.

He hoped that clinical trials involving up to 50 hospitals around the country would test various formulations of the drugs.

The disease killed about 2 per cent of those infected in China, the ignition point of the pandemic, but Health Minister Greg Hunt has said the death rate in Australia is expected to be closer to the South Korean mark of 0.87 per cent.