According to STAT News, nearly all patients with fever and respiratory issues were discharged in a matter of days after participating in the clinical trial at The University of Chicago Medicine.
Gilead Sciences Inc’s shares surged 16 percent in after hours trading Thursday when the encouraging report emerged, according to Reuters.
“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” Dr Kathleen Mullane, the infectious disease expert who is leading the trial, was quoted as saying in a video obtained by STAT.
“Most of our patients are severe and most of them are leaving at six days, so that tells us duration of therapy doesn’t have to be 10 days. We have very few that went out to 10 days, maybe three.”
The university reportedly recruited 125 patients into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials.
Of those people, 113 were allowed to go home and two of them died.
Gilead told Reuters “the totality of the data need to be analyzed in order to draw any conclusions from the trial.”
Likewise, University of Chicago Medicine cautioned against the drug being labelled as a cure just yet.
This university is one of 152 trial sites around the world treating 2,400 severely ill patients in a “single arm” trial sponsored by Gilead.
Adapted from The Sun UK
Award winning journalist and writer who has worked as a stringer for a couple of acclaimed South Africa based German journalists, covered 3 Ugandan elections, 2008 Kenya election crisis, with interests in business and sports reporting.
