The potential Covid-19 treatment drugs you are hearing less about

While focus of potential Covid-19 treatment drugs has fallen on antivirals such as Gilead's remdesivir, there are anti-inflammatory drugs being tested to mitigate the huge overreaction of the immune system often seen in patients.

By Arundhati Parmar on April 20, 2020 4:01 pm

As the world races to find a vaccine to prevent Covid-19, there are many drugs in clinical trials that have the potential to treat the disease, such as Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir. But in addition to antivirals, there are also drugs in clinical studies being developed to treat some of the more extreme symptoms of Covid-19 that result from the body’s immune system overreacting to the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2 in what is known as a cytokine storm.

Several anti-inflammatory drugs being tested for these immune-mediated symptoms are already approved in autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and are now being repurposed for Covid-19. Here is a list of a few of them explaining how they work and what they target. [Not included below is Alexion Pharmaceuticals’ Ultomiris (ravulizumab-cwvz) with the company announcing Monday that it would launch a Phase III trial of the drug in patients with severe pneumonia and ARDS related to Covid-19.