A SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE TIME COURSE TO DEVELOP TREATMENTS FOR COVID-19

Ngo, B. T.; Rendell, M.

ABSTRACT Background. The spread of COVID-19 from Wuhan in China throughout the world has been alamingly rapid. Epidemiologic techniques succeeded in containing the disease in China, but efforts were not as successful in the rest of the world, particularly the United States where there have been 1,592, 599 cases with 95,863 deaths as of May 25, 2020. Projections are for continued new infections and deaths if no effective treatments can be activated over the next six months.. We performed a systematic review to determine the potential time course of development of treatments and vaccines focusing on availability in the last half of 2020. Methods. Our search was performed during the week of May 17, 2020. Publications: We reviewed up to date information from several sources to identify potential treatments for COVID-19: We used the Reagan-Udall Expanded Access Navigator COVID-19 Treatment Hub to track the efforts of companies to develop treatments. We then used the results to search for publications on pubmed.gov and on MedRxiv, the preprint server. We further used a targeted Google search to find announcements of trial results. Clinical Trials: We searched for all investigational trials involving potential treatments using several different sources: (A) covid-trials.org, then validated results on (B) clinicaltrials.gov and the (C) World Health Organization's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (WHO ICTRP). We focused on trials which were completed or currently recruiting for patients, reasoning that the timeline to arrive at treatments by the end of the year would require completion within the next 6 months. We excluded studies which were clearly observational, with no randomization, control or comparison group. We furtherset a cutoff of 100 for numbers of subjects since smaller trial size could lack statistical power to establish superiority of the intervention over the control condition. Results. Published Data: We found 19 publications reporting findings on 6 classes of agents. There were 9 publications related to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), three on lopanovir/ritonavir (LPV/R) (one of which was combined with interferon beta-1),three on remdesivir, two on favipiravir, one on mepaluzamab, and one on tocilizumab. Ten publications reported randomized controlled trials, the rest were retrospective observational. Only one publication touched on outpatient management, the rest on hospitalized patients. Clinical Trials: We found 409 trials meeting our minimum requirement of 100 subjects which were recruiting or completed. The WHO has launched the Solidarity megatrial performed in over 100 countries actively comparing HCQ, lopanovir/ritonavir (LPV/R) alone and in combination with interferon beta-1, and remdesivir. That trial is scheduled to complete enrollment in the first quarter of 2021. In addition, we found 46 trials of HCQ, 11 trials of LPV/R and 8 trials of interferons. There were 18 ongoing trials of antiviral agents, 24 immune modulator trials, 9 vaccine trials, and 62 trials of other agents.We excluded a large number of trials of Chinese traditional medications, reasoning that there was insufficient clinical experience with these agents outside China to offer these treatments to the rest of the world. Forty four trials were hoping to complete enrollment by the end of the second quarter of 2020. Of these, only 9 were conducted on outpatients. A few vaccine trials are hoping to complete Phase 3 enrollment by the end of the third quarter, but a prolonged follow-up of patients will likely be required. Conclusion. Several treatments for severe disease in hospitalized patients have now been granted emergency authorization. However, the disease is propagated primarily by infected ambulatory individuals. There are only a few randomized controlled studies in outpatients which can be expected to yield results in time to impact on the continuing spread of the epidemic in 2020. It will be necessary for public health authorities to make hard decisions with limited data. The choices will be hardest in dealing with potential early release of vaccines. Keywords: Coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-Cov-2, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine