Gilead’s Remdesivir Reduces Risk of Death by 62% in Comparative Analysis of Phase 3 Data

Additional clinical trial data on remdesivir, an investigational antiviral for the treatment of COVID-19, announced by Gilead Sciences, Inc. (Foster City, CA, USA) has indicated a reduced risk of death and improved recovery.

The data presented at the Virtual COVID-19 Conference as part of the 23rd International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2020: Virtual) included a comparative analysis of the Phase 3 SIMPLE-Severe trial and a real-world retrospective cohort of patients with severe COVID-19. In this analysis, remdesivir was associated with an improvement in clinical recovery and a 62% reduction in the risk of mortality compared with standard of care, an important finding that requires confirmation in prospective clinical trials. Additionally, separate subgroup analyses from the Phase 3 SIMPLE-Severe trial, including an evaluation of the safety and efficacy of remdesivir across different racial and ethnic patient subgroups treated in the US, found that traditionally marginalized racial or ethnic groups treated with remdesivir in this study experienced similar clinical outcomes as the overall patient population in the study.


Gilead also presented new analyses of the company’s compassionate use program, which demonstrated that 83% of pediatric patients and 92% of pregnant and postpartum women with a broad spectrum of disease severity recovered by Day 28. No new safety signals were identified with remdesivir across these populations. To further the understanding of these results in individual patient cases, Gilead recently announced the initiation of a global, open-label Phase 2/3 trial to evaluate the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of remdesivir in pediatric patients from birth to less than 18 years of age. Gilead is also collaborating on a study for pregnant women.

“We are working to broaden our understanding of the full utility of remdesivir. To address the urgency of the continuing pandemic, we are sharing data with the research community as quickly as possible with the goal of providing transparent and timely updates on new developments with remdesivir,” said Merdad Parsey, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer, Gilead Sciences. “These data presented at the Virtual COVID-19 Conference shed additional light on the use of remdesivir in specific patient populations, including those that may be susceptible to higher rates of COVID-19 infection, as well as others that are particularly vulnerable, including children and pregnant and postpartum women.”

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