Malaria drugs might be helpful for treating COVID-19 patients

Two studies by researchers in China have identified existing drugs that may be helpful for some COVID-19 patients.

In Short: A malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, might help COVID-19 reduce symptoms and patients recover sooner, but a lot more research needs to be done before using the drug as a treatment option. 

COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) is the infectious disease caused by a new coronavirus. Because the virus is relatively new, most people are not immune and there are currently no drugs that can treat it or vaccines that can prevent it. This has helped the virus spread and cause a global pandemic. Scientists are now working to develop vaccines to prevent the infection and treatments that can help people recover. 

Viruses are small, non-living particles that are essentially a container, filled with instructions for how to make more containers. Viruses can’t reproduce without the help of a living cell, so viruses first need to infect a cell. The cell then “reads” the instructions and makes more viruses. Some cells can recognize and destroy viruses, but some viruses can go unrecognized, and turn cells into virus-producing factories. The infection and the body’s response to it are what cause symptoms like coughing, fever, and pneumonia.

The simplest way to think of a virus

A container (blue), filled with instructions for how to make more containers (red).

Drugs can prevent the virus from reproducing, by stopping the virus from infecting a cell or preventing the cell from reading the instructions and assembling new viruses. Antiviral drugs can cause serious side effects that harm uninfected cells, though, so it is important to make sure the drugs are effective with minimal side effects. Often, it can be faster and cheaper to see if approved drugs can be repurposed for different illnesses or treatments. In two very recent studies, scientists tried to see if any existing drugs might effective at preventing infection or treating COVID-19.

In the first study, researchers tried to determine if any drugs that have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) might be effective against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2. These preliminary experiments were done with monkey kidney cells. Out of the 7 antiviral drugs, 2 in particular were promising, including a common malaria drug, chloroquine. Chloroquine’s antiviral activity is likely because it can prevent viruses from infecting and reproducing in cells.

Next, a second group of researchers wanted to see if a related malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), could be used to treat COVID-19 patients to either reduce their symptoms or speed up their recovery. Patients with mild symptoms that tested positive for the virus were treated with HCQ for 5 days and then reassessed on Day 6.

Summary of study results: HCQ slightly improved COVID-19 patient symptoms over 5 days, compared to a placebo.

While both groups of patients showed improvements after 5 days, patients that received HCQ improved slightly faster and were less likely to have their symptoms worsen. 

The results of this study are promising for supporting patients with COVID-19 and may be useful as a treatment option, but there are a few important things to keep in mind:

• the study used a very small number of patients (62)

• the researchers only looked at mild cases of COVID-19

• they didn’t try different doses of HCQ or treatment lengths 

• it is not known exactly how HCQ works to improve COVID-19 symptoms

• and, the study was published online before other scientists have reviewed it. Normally, other scientists review studies before they are published to ensure that the data is accurate, the experiments were performed well, and the conclusions of the study are supported by the evidence.

  This process is called peer review, where peers from the scientific community basically check your work. Because COVID-19 research is vitally important right now, many scientists make the results of their studies available to the public before other scientists have reviewed the study. This helps speed up research but means that readers have to be careful to not over-interpret studies, especially before they’ve been peer- reviewed.

Scientists in universities and companies around the world are working on prevention and treatment methods for COVID-19. Researchers in Canada and Europe have just published a study that identified a drug that can prevent coronavirus infection in human cells grown in a lab. Moderna Therapeutics has begun testing a vaccine in human trials. And Eli Lilly and AbCellera Biologics are working on therapies to treat COVID-19, using antibodies from patients that have recovered from the disease. This is just a small sampling of the work that is being done right now.

While coronavirus has quickly spread throughout the world, research into prevention and treatment has exploded, promising new vaccines, new therapies, and new treatments with old drugs, with new studies published every week. I won’t focus on covering other studies like this for now, because the amount of research being done is overwhelming, and our understanding of COVID-19 is changing daily. But as most news right now is about this pandemic, this likely isn’t my last post on this topic.