Australia Studies Coronavirus Cure, Medications Still Under Secret Trial Before Release?

Coronavirus cure intervention in Australia has now kicked up a notch in a secret trial to purge the virus. Two existing drugs were used on a group of patients and were found to be successfully treated.

Drugs used for these secret trials were the HIV meds Kaletra and the malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine.

These two drugs were used on coronavirus samples in test tubes and were found effective.

All the patients who took part in the trial are completely well and researchers are analyzing the results.

The group of scientists are from the University of Queensland Centre, Clinical Research Director Professor David Paterson, also a Consultant Infectious Diseases Physician at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, made the discovery responsible.

According to Professor Paterson, "These medications have the potential to be a real cure for all, unlike the random anecdotal experiences of some people."

He added that about 50 hospitals will decide how to utilize the drugs and all the logistics in the deployment.

These drug trials with HIV meds Kaletra and the malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine will be definite in how each works as a combo or just using one on each patient.

Professor Paterson said that all is a go-to enroll patients in the vaccine trials by the end of the month. It will be the first wave of Australia patients to get a real-world experience.

Also read: 10 Coronavirus Drugs and Vaccines in Development

Both Kaletra and hydroxychloroquine are orally administered as tablets, and they are already available for real testing.

The federal government is giving $13 million to allow researchers to speed up effective drug therapies as cases increase.

Approval of ten treatments can be expedited for release if the drugs prove very successful in the drug trials.

Chloroquine phosphate has received a lot of press, which is an anti-malarial medication. This drug is sold as the name Arla', that is used by doctors for the coronavirus outbreak.

A trial conducted in France using the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, had results of 25% of the subjects showed symptoms of the coronavirus. An improvement over the 90% who did not get administered with the drug.

Other interesting result is that Lopinavir and ritonavir, the active drugs in Kaletra in tests of 199 patients afflicted with COVID-19, did not have notable improvement.

The New England Journal of Medicine, published a study last March 18 mentioned that 99 patients had the drug, but did not improve over the standard care in four weeks.

Researchers concluded that all adult positive infectees did not improve with lopinavir-ritonavir treatment. Not a good result based on the data gained.

During the study both groups had 16 days before getting any clinical improvements.

It is notable that those taking Lopinavir and ritonavir had no pronounced improvement given the same time frame. But those treated with a Kaletra was not spending as much time in intensive care, just 6 days when the control group with either Lopinavir and ritonavir was 11 days.