Coronavirus Notebook: Dexamethasone Reduces Deaths In Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients

 
• By Ian Schofield
  
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The standout development in this latest Coronavirus Notebook is that the cheap and plentiful steroid dexamethasone has been shown to reduce deaths by a third in ventilated COVID-19 patients in the UK Recovery trial. In other news, there is fresh funding for smaller firms working on potential treatments and vaccines, and a number of organizations have decided to make their research tools and resources available free of charge in return for open publication of any coronavirus-related findings.

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Many avenues are being explored in COVID-19 clinical trials • Source: Shutterstock

On 16 June it was announced that a low-cost, widely available steroid, dexamethasone, had become the first drug to show an improvement in survival in hospitalized patients requiring ventilation. The data came from the large-scale UK Recovery trial, run by the University of Oxford, which is investigating a number of potential treatments including low-dose dexamethasone, the HIV combination lopinavir/ritonavir, and the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine. 

Martin Landray, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the university’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, and one of the trial’s...

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