LONDON (Reuters) – Results from clinical trials of possible drugs to treat the coronavirus are likely a few months away, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam said on Friday.
Van-Tam said Britain wanted to move on to new medicines in the next round of clinical trials, including those that might be in development for other diseases but might “have a role to play”.
“I know that there’ll be a question about when are we going to get some results from these clinical trials, and my straight answer to you is: ‘I don’t know.’ I think it’s going to be a few months,” he told a news conference.
Health Minister Matt Hancock said that until possible treatments for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, were shown to be effective, the only protection against it was to stay at home.
He said that so far clinical trials had been focused on repurposing existing drugs and steroids for treatment of COVID-19.
“We’ve also set up an expert therapeutics taskforce to search for and shortlist other candidate medicines for trials,” Hancock said.
“We need more patients to volunteer to be part of these trials because the bigger the trials, the better the data and the faster we can roll out the treatments, if – and only if -it’s proven to work.”
(Reporting by Andy Bruce, William James and Alistair Smout, Writing by Kylie MacLellan, Editing by Estelle Shirbon and Stephen Addison)
