A top scientist at China's healthcare giant Sinopharm said the group's COVID-19 drug would soon be put into a clinical trial in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and, while numerous COVID-19 drugs have reportedly been authorized for emergency use around the world, vaccination is still the most effective way to tackle the pandemic in terms of building herd immunity.
The human immunoglobulin drug, an intravenous injection, has obtained authorization for clinical trials in China and the UAE, and the trials would launch in the coming days, said Zhang Yuntao, vice president and chief scientist of Sinopharm's subsidiary China National Biotec Group (CNBG), noting that it is the world's first special immunoglobulin product that has obtained official approval for clinical trials.
The drug has already been used in recent flare-ups across China and it has proved to have a good therapeutic effect. The other medicine, based on monoclonal antibodies, has showed good neutralizing effects on the novel coronavirus in current experiments and is undergoing the procedure to obtain clinical trial approval from the Chinese authorities, Zhang said.
Besides CNBG, many other Chinese firms are making steady progress on the research and development (R&D) of COVID-19 treatments.
For example, Brii Biosciences, a company that has dual headquarters in China and the US, has applied to the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization for a SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing monoclonal antibody combination therapy called BRII-196/BRII-198, which can reduce the rate of hospitalization and death by 78 percent among high-risk COVID-19 patients.
The medicines of CNBG and Brii Biosciences are bio-macromolecular drugs that cure patients by neutralizing the virus and preventing it from replicating in the human body. They are of good specificity, efficacy and safety, Zhang said.
Meanwhile, the two drugs from Merck and Pfizer that were revealed as the latest improvements last week are small molecule drugs. These drugs have various working mechanisms to inhibit the virus' absorption, replication, assembly and release, he explained.
Drugs can reduce the incidence rate of severe cases and deaths, but cannot terminate the pandemic, Zhang said, noting that the usage of both vaccines and drugs can help to control the impact of the pandemic to the smallest scale.
