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July 17, 2020 13h16
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COVID-19 : disorganization in the research
Ariane Chevrier
Agence Science-Presse
The disorganization, lack of collaboration and the loss of financial resources seem to characterize the research of drugs for the COVID-19.
At least that is what concludes an analysis of the american media STAT : a little over 1200 clinical research identified in the database clinicaltrials.gov, few provide satisfactory answers, and for good reason : most are too small, that is to say that they study too few patients, and they lack control groups, or groups of patients who did not receive the drug and could serve as a basis of comparison. Dated 24 June, 39 % of the studies, some started in January, were planning to recruit less than 100 patients.
A clinical study on six in the United States still a student of hydroxychloroquine, a drug whose efficacy has not yet been proven. It is march 19, the us president, Donald Trump, has said that this drug was ” encouraging “, with the result that at the beginning of April, nearly 58% of the patients hospitalized in the United States received. According to STATS, a magazine specialized in health, several studies conducted subsequently have not only perform a monitoring of the administration of drugs in hospitals, which was not enough to prove efficacy.
It is certain that researchers are under pressure to develop as quickly as possible treatments against the coronavirus, but this pressure may be a consequence of slow, rather than accelerate, the progress of the research, and comment on the two authors of the analysis, published on the 6th of July.
In comparison, in the United Kingdom, in the framework of the project of Recovery, researchers have instead relied on the massive collection of data on multiple treatments at the same time, which has allowed us to open the door to other drugs such as dexamethasone, which could potentially reduce the number of deaths of patients requiring an artificial respirator.
