Big Pharma Is Meddling in the Race for a COVID-19 Treatment

[perugu_vada]

In New Haven, meanwhile, Dr. Joseph Vinetz, an infectious disease doctor at Yale School of Medicine, is seeking to launch a clinical study of the drug camostat mesylate, a generic medication approved in Japan to treat chronic pancreatitis that he hopes can be approved and marketed to treat COVID-19. If the trial succeeds, he said, this could be ”a total game changer.”
 

“The virus that causes COVID-19 requires a protein to get inside of the cells that line the respiratory tract,” Vinetz explained. In test tubes and in mice, he said, camostat has been shown to inhibit an enzyme that allows the virus to enter those cells. Another published experiment showed that camostat prevented mice from dying of the SARS virus. As of yet, there’s no data that shows how it could impact the novel coronavirus in humans.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/big-pharma-meddling-in-race-for-covid-19-treatment

[Pitta]