Published: Less than 30 min ago
A new drug intended for cancer patients has, according to a study, been shown to reduce mortality for patients with severe covid-19, reports Sweden’s Radio Ekot.
As a result, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has started a review of the drug sabizabulin, despite the fact that the American company Veru, which is behind it, did not apply for one.
– What is being done here is that we are looking at this in a kind of quick review that goes faster and it is so that the European member states themselves can make a decision if they want to make the medicine available earlier, says Filip Josephson at the Swedish Medicines Agency, to the radio.
Among the patients who received the drug in a phase 3 study in April, a reduction in mortality of just over 50 percent was seen, according to the study.
Magnus Gisslén, professor of infectious diseases at Gothenburg University and senior physician at the infectious disease clinic at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, tells Ekot that the results are “very promising”.
But he emphasizes at the same time that the mortality in the control group that did not receive the drug was unusually high, which could mean that the results in the study can be overestimated.