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LONDON, June 29 (Reuters) – A combination of antiviral drugs used to treat HIV had no beneficial effect on hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in a large-scale randomized trial, British scientists said on Monday.
Scientists who conducted the RECOVERY trial at the University of Oxford said the results “convincingly rule out any significant mortality benefit of lopinavir-ritonavir in the hospitalized COVID-19 patients we studied.”
The scientists found no difference in mortality, length of hospital stay, or risk of receiving a ventilator, when they compared 1,596 patients receiving lopinavir-ritonavir with 3,376 patients in a control group.
Kaletra from AbbVie Inc is a combination of the drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, which are used together to fight HIV. The company had increased its supplies while determining if it can be used to treat COVID-19.
“These preliminary results show that for hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and not with a ventilator, lopinavir-ritonavir is not an effective treatment,” said Peter Horby, lead investigator of the trial.
The scientists were unable to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the drug combination in patients with respirators due to the difficulty of administering it.
Lopinavir-ritonavir is also being studied in a trial by the World Health Organization.
The Oxford-based RECOVERY trial has examined the effectiveness of six possible COVID-19 treatments, involving a total of 11,800 patients.
The arm of the trial studying dexamethasone, a steroid, found that it reduced the death rate of patients who needed oxygen. Another arm found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, had no benefit. (Alistair Smout Report Edited by Franklin Paul and Peter Graff)
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