CDC Director Robert Redfield told lawmakers during a House appropriations hearing Tuesday that Gilead's antiviral remdesivir is being used for patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, as an expanded treatment option outside of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's normal approval pathway for investigation drugs.
"For people that are very sick, and we have a number that are very sick, there is an experimental drug remdesivir that's available right now in compassionate use," Redfield said. "This country has used it, and a number of people in the state of Washington have been treated with it."
Clinical testing is currently underway at the National Institutes of Health to compare the drug with placebos, Redfield said. China has also been testing remdesivir and other antiretroviral drugs first developed to treat HIV to consider their use as effective COVID-19 treatments.
"We're going to know by April whether that drug works or not, and that's important because that's a drug that can save lives if it works," Redfield said.
For months, Gilead has been evaluating the effectiveness of remdesivir in adults with COVID-19 through clinical studies after the FDA accepted Gilead's investigational new drug filing for remdesivir.
"Gilead's primary focus is on rapidly determining the safety and efficacy of remdesivir as a potential treatment for COVID-19," Gilead's chief medical officer Merdad Parsey said in a statement on Feb. 26. "The speed with which remdesivir has moved into clinical development for this coronavirus reflects the pressing need for treatment options."
Gilead is among a large group of companies attempting to develop a coronavirus vaccine. GeoVax Inc. and BravoVax Co. Ltd., as well as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc., have also been working to develop a vaccine.
--Editing by John Campbell.
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