..wonder how long it will be till CBD gets a shot at/in the varied co-treatments of side ailments in COVID-19.. ?? + jobs/tax dollars
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Trump Article: But experts in the field say that treatments most likely to reach the market in September or October are more modest, repurposed therapeutic drugs meant to treat late-stage symptoms of the illness.
Hundreds of treatments and antivirals are currently undergoing U.S. clinical trials. But the potential drugs that are furthest along in the process are medications already on the market to treat other illnesses or have been under review for many years.
Many of those are anti-inflammatory and blood clot treatments that could mitigate the severity of the disease, decrease hospital stays and reduce fatalities.
The success of these more modest drugs would be less dramatic than a tailor-made treatment that could prevent the disease from progressing to a life-threatening state. But they could still alter the dynamics of an expected autumn wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, which already has taken over 138,000 lives and continues to ripple across the country.
"If you look at the pipeline, there are more shots on goal on the treatment side - the late-stage inflammatory issues," said David Thomas, vice president of industry research at BIO, a major trade association representing biotechnology companies and institutions. "The goal would be to have more therapeutics that would decrease the severity of the late-stage disease."
The hope is that these drugs might help lower the death toll and the burden on intensive care units in hospitals.
Experts compare the impact of these drugs to that of remdesivir, the most prominent repurposed, antiviral treatment currently available to coronavirus patients. The drug is produced by Gilead Sciences and was originally tested for its effectiveness against other infectious diseases, including the SARS and MERS coronaviruses.
Preliminary clinical trials on the effects of remdesivir in coronavirus patients found that the drug has reduced hospitalization times. More robust clinical trials will be necessary to determine the extent to which the drug helps patients recover.
"You have this emergent need for therapeutics, and people are taking everything they have off the shelf," said Dr. Lawrence Blatt, chief executive officer of Aligos Therapeutics, a California-based biotechnology company currently working on a therapeutic candidate for COVID-19. "The net result is that most of the therapeutics that are in clinical trials right now are either not going to be effective or will have marginal benefit."
"Let's think of it like a lock and key. Each virus has its own lock," Blatt continued. "If you took your key from one door and tried to unlock another door, it wouldn't work very well. You have to make a key for that door specifically
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