BEIJING – Share prices of Chinese biotechs that partner with Gilead Science Inc. have surged in China this week, after the U.S. firm’s remdesivir was identified as the most promising drug candidate to treat 2019-nCoV.
The drug screens prompted by the SARS and MERS outbreaks have been useful for quickly identifying drug candidates. But in terms of their epidemiology, “SARS and MERS were different from this coronavirus,” Allison McGeer explained at a Feb. 3 webinar by Evercore ISI.
At this very early point in the emerging 2019-nCoV outbreak, knowledge about the virus is insufficient to predict what shape that outbreak will ultimately take. But knowledge about the virus is accumulating at remarkable speed, and experience with other viruses is helping to shape the response to the newest coronavirus threat. 2019-nCoV, sometimes called Wuhan coronavirus after its source, is the third coronavirus after SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV with the potential to cause serious illness and death that has emerged since the beginning of the 21st century.
Now that U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar has declared a nationwide public health emergency due to the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), HHS is saying it may need more money to help it be as proactive and aggressive as possible in detecting the virus and containing an outbreak.
HONG KONG – In another example that communication is proving as difficult as containment in the current coronavirus outbreak, China’s state media reported, to increasing skepticism, that a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) oral liquid could inhibit the new coronavirus.
BEIJING – China will kickstart a phase III trial Feb. 3 to determine whether patients with 2019-nCoV can be treated with Gilead Sciences Inc.’s NUC inhibitor, remdesivir, which was originally developed for Ebola, four days after a U.S. patient was said to have recovered by using the drug candidate.
BEIJING – The current speed of new developments in the 2019-nCov outbreak is illustrated by a Jan. 28, 2020, press conference in Munich, where Andreas Zapf, head of the infection task force in the Bavarian ministry for health and food safety, briefed reporters on the first confirmed German case.
BEIJING – China will kickstart a phase III trial Feb. 3 to determine whether patients with 2019-nCoV can be treated with Gilead Sciences Inc.’s NUC inhibitor, remdesivir, which was originally developed for Ebola, four days after a U.S. patient was said to have recovered by using the drug candidate.
BEIJING – The current speed of new developments in the 2019-nCov outbreak is illustrated by a Jan. 28, 2020, press conference in Munich, where Andreas Zapf, head of the infection task force in the Bavarian ministry for health and food safety, briefed reporters on the first confirmed German case.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a "public health emergency of international concern" over the global outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), reversing a week-ago decision by its International Health Regulations Emergency Committee. The move comes "not because of what is happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries," said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noting his confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak. "Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it," he said.
