taggit Summary
For both of those reasons, drug companies have largely pursued small clinical trials with too few patients to show that their own drugs worked, hoping to hit a home run. Safety trials this summer looked promising for the drug, and the drug company Merck started a larger clinical trial of 1,300 patients in October to see if it will lower virus levels. And while NIH-funded scientists are studying more than a dozen old drugs for diseases such as arthritis, cancer, malaria, hepatitis, or gout to see if they can fight SARS-CoV-2, the only antiviral besides remdesivir in clinical trials is a Japanese pancreatitis drug developed in the 1980s. Scientists were initially optimistic that these drugs would similarly work against SARS-CoV-2, but this virus is different enough that most of those drugs may not be effective.