UK scientists discover the world's first effective treatment for Covid-19
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
UK scientists have discovered that a medicine which is more than 60 years old is effective in reducing deaths from Covid-19.
The steroid Dexamethasone benefits those on ventilation, reducing risk of death by 35 per cent.
At today's Downing Street briefing the UK government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said: “The way in which we find out where the drugs work is through clinical trials and I think this is an extremely good example of a clinical trial that has been very well conducted.
“It's had large numbers of patients across the UK and Peter Horby has led the study – it's called the recovery study.”
Professor Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health at the University of Oxford, said: “The trial has been conducted in all countries in the United Kingdom, in more than 175 hospitals, with a tremendous effort by NHS staff who were under an enormous pressure to actually talk to patients about the benefits of getting good clinical trial evidence to make sure we have the best treatments, and get them into the trial.
“I think we've broken some records. In three months we've enrolled over 11,000 patients – by far the biggest clinical trial in the world – and we've been testing six different drugs."
Of Dexamethasone he said: “It is a steroid drug, it's an old drug, some people would call it a very boring drug. It has been around for 60 odd years, it costs pounds and, overseas, it costs pennies.
“We closed that arm of the trial on Monday, June 8 because we had enrolled more than 2000 patients on Dexamethasone and we compared them to 4000 patients who had standard care. What we saw was really quite remarkable.
“We've different treatment groups and the drug has a different treatment effect in different treatment groups, so in ventilated patients with Covid-19 the drug Dexamethasone, 10 days of treatment with that by tablet or injection reduces the risk of death by about 35 per cent.
“In patients on the ward who require oxygen and have Covid-19, it reduces the risk of death by about 20 per cent.
"That covers about 75 per cent of patients in the hospital who will receive a mortality benefit from using this drug.
“There's another group of patients who don't require oxygen and who have Covid-19 and we did not see the benefit in those patients, so it's not a drug that you would use in the community or on an out-patient basis or with patients who didn't have breathing difficulties.
“It is very widely available, it is on every pharmacy shelf in every hospital. It's available throughout the world and it's extremely cheap, so we looked at the numbers and patients in intensive care with this drug – we will save one life and the total cost of treating all patients is only about £40.
“So this is really, really remarkable. We're continuing with the trial because we still have four other drugs in the trial and what we hope we can do is build on this very strong foundation, adding additional drugs and continuing to bring down the case fatality rate."
