Posted on 06/10/2020
2 min read
The combination of the antiviral drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, used against the AIDS virus, is not effective in patients hospitalized for Covid-19, the managers of the large British clinical trial, Recovery, concluded.
This finding is not new, since these researchers had publicly announced it on June 29. But this time they are publishing the detailed results in the medical journal The Lancet.
“Treatment of Covid-19 with the lopinavir-ritonavir combination has been recommended in many countries. However, the results of our trial show that it is not an effective treatment for patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19.“, commented one of the people in charge of Recovery, Prof. Martin Landray (University of Oxford), quoted in a press release from The Lancet.
To rule on the lopinavir-ritonavir combination (marketed under the name Kaletra), the British researchers administered it to 1,616 patients and compared it with 3,424 others, over the period from March 19 to June 29.
Result: there was no significant difference in mortality after 28 days (23% of patients who received treatment versus 22% of those who did not).
Lopinavir-ritonavir also does not reduce the risk of being placed on artificial ventilation, or shorten the length of hospital stay.
At the beginning of July, just after Recovery’s announcements on the ineffectiveness of this treatment, the managers of the European clinical trial Solidarity (supervised by the WHO) and its French partner Discovery had in turn abandoned it.
The Recovery trial, which includes 13,000 patients from 176 UK hospitals, has significantly improved knowledge about treatments for Covid.
He first showed in early June that hydroxychloroquine had no beneficial effect. Then, in mid-June, he demonstrated that dexamethasone (a corticosteroid) reduced mortality in seriously ill patients. This treatment is one of those administered to US President Donald Trump in recent days.
Although dozens of treatments against Covid-19 are being evaluated around the world, dexamethasone is so far the only one to have shown efficacy in terms of reducing mortality.
An antiviral, remdesivir (also administered to Mr. Trump) slightly reduces the recovery time of hospitalized Covid-19 patients, but has not shown any benefit in terms of reducing mortality.
Recovery is evaluating several other treatments: the experimental cocktail of synthetic antibodies from the company Regeneron (also administered to Mr. Trump), tocilizumab and plasma collected from people who have been affected by the disease.
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