A Cure for Coronvirus

A team of a dozen executives at drugmaker Gilead Sciences Inc. GILD 1.14% meets daily to discuss the coronavirus epidemic in China and the company’s cross-continental scramble to develop the first drug for the new disease. If the company’s drug succeeds in studies in China, it could become the first treatment proven to work against a respiratory virus that has killed more than 1,000 people and infected some 42,600 in fewer than three months. There are some positive albeit preliminary signs, notably the recovery of a 35-year-old man in Washington state whose condition rapidly improved after receiving the drug and who was recently discharged from the hospital. “We’ve done this long enough that we know it could be an anecdote,” says Gilead’s chief medical officer, Merdad Parsey, cautioning that the result could be a false positive and that the drug could fail in broader testing. Gilead has been sprinting to ramp up manufacturing of the drug, called remdesivir, to meet a surge in demand if it proves effective, and provide the medicine to two clinical trials of 760 Chinese patients and a handful of patients requesting emergency use. The Foster City, Calif., drug maker is among several companies developing treatments targeting the coronavirus. AbbVie Inc. and Johnson & Johnson have shipped HIV drugs to China to see if the agents work against the virus. Gilead, a longtime maker of treatments for viruses like HIV and hepatitis C, had been monitoring the outbreak since late December when the first reports of an unexplained pneumonia outbreak emerged from China. The company accelerated its push to study remdesivir after Chinese scientists said Jan. 9 that they had identified the source of the outbreak as a coronavirus, a family of diseases common in animals that can cause severe respiratory illness when transmitted to humans. Gilead invented remdesivir several years ago and first developed it to treat Ebola, a virus that has ravaged parts of eastern and central Africa. The drug was less effective than rival drugs in a study of Ebola patients in Congo last year. Yet Gilead had reason to think remdesivir might work in coronaviruses. Company researchers working with academic scientists found that remdesivir was effective in treating mice infected with another coronavirus known as Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. The work was partially funded with $3.8 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health. The mice studies were far from definitive but suggested the drug had promise against the new coronavirus. The data were published in the journal Nature Communications on Jan. 10. “The attention level went up dramatically when we found out it was a coronavirus, and that was the turning point,” Dr. Parsey says. “That’s when we got mobilized and formed a team across the company to see what we could do here.” Gilead was soon exchanging information about the virus with officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They discussed how to determine if remdesivir might be effective at treating the outbreak. By Jan. 20, Gilead was in talks with Beijing pulmonologist Cao Bin, a prominent researcher deployed to Wuhan to help lead the medical care of patients. With input from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the WHO, Gilead worked with Dr. Cao’s team to design the studies, says Gilead’s Diana Brainard, senior vice president for HIV and emerging viral infections. The trials are being conducted at several hospitals in Wuhan, according to Chinese news reports. Last week, Gilead shipped the last batch of remdesivir needed to supply the two studies, the first in patients with mild-to-moderate disease and the second in patients with severe disease. The studies are expected to be completed in early April. “We’re all tracking the number of infections and deaths, and we really want to help,” says Dr. Brainard. The company’s “coronavirus response team” now numbers about 100 employees across the company and includes executives from all major departments. Gilead employees in the U.S., along with many of the 400 employees it has in Beijing and Shanghai, have worked hundreds of extra hours since the mobilization began, juggling 3 a.m. conference calls, late-night text messages and 7 a.m. office meetings to keep up with colleagues in different time zones, Dr. Brainard says.