WASHINGTON — The World Health Organization recommended against using Gilead Sciences Inc.'s remdesivir to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients less than a month after U.S. regulators granted the drug a speedy approval.
"There is currently no evidence that it improves survival or the need for ventilation," a panel of WHO-convened experts developing COVID-19 treatment guidelines said in The BMJ medical journal.
The recommendation is a blow to Gilead's drug, which was one of the first thought to offer a meaningful benefit in treatment of coronavirus patients after a study showed it reduced their recovery time. The antiviral has been used widely to treat COVID-19 and was among the drugs President Donald Trump received when he was diagnosed with the disease in early October.
The experts made the recommendation after the results of a global trial sponsored by the WHO, called Solidarity, found last month that remdesivir didn't reduce deaths. They also reviewed data from three other trials and said the drug "has no meaningful effect" on the time it took patients to clinically improve.
The Solidarity results were published Oct. 15. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug a week later, basing its decision on a trial run by the National Institutes of Health that showed remdesivir reduced hospitalized patients' recovery time by five days.
Despite the discordance with the WHO, the FDA said in its review of remdesivir that "there were no issues identified that would benefit from discussion" by a panel of outside advisers. FDA typically convenes such a panel before deciding whether to approve a drug in situations where there are questions arising from clinical trial data.
Gilead has questioned the results of WHO's trial.
The FDA originally granted emergency use authorization to remdesivir, also known by its brand name, Veklury, in May. Gilead requested full FDA approval in August. The European Commission granted the drug conditional authorization in July based on the U.S.-led clinical trial.
The WHO experts wrote in The BMJ that their findings shouldn't be interpreted to mean that remdesivir is ineffective, but that "there is no evidence based on currently available data that it does improve patient-important outcomes."
The limited evidence for using the drug was weighed alongside the "relatively high cost and resource implications associated with remdesivir," which is given intravenously, they said in a news release.
The FDA was earlier criticized for hastily authorizing an anti-malarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, to treat COVID-19. Trump repeatedly touted the drug early in the pandemic, though medical evidence was lacking to support his claims. The FDA then revoked its authorization after hydroxychloroquine was shown not to combat the virus and was linked to harmful side effects.
