Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial recruits first patient
02 Apr 2020
The Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial in EU & UK (ACTT-EU/UK), which is testing treatments for COVID-19, recruited its first patient on 31 March.
The trial, which is taking place in around 75 hospitals around the world, will initially test the drug remdesivir. Remdesivir is an antiviral drug that was developed to treat Ebola and Marburg virus infections.
In the ACTT-EU/UK trial, adults who have been hospitalised with COVID-19 will be allocated at random to receive either:
- Remdesivir (given via a drip)
- Placebo (saline via a drip)
for up to 10 days, while they are still in hospital.
The trial is double blinded, which means that neither the people taking part, nor their doctors, will know if they have received remdesivir or placebo. This, together with the random allocation, helps us tell whether any improvements we see are due to the study treatment, or whether people would have got better anyway.
People taking part in the trial will be followed up for 29 days, to see how they do, and whether they experience side-effects from the treatment. Initially the trial aims to recruit 440 people.
We hope to have the first results from the ACTT-EU/UK trial in early summer of 2020.
The ACTT-EU/UK trial has an adaptive design, which means if new treatments are identified that might help patients with severe COVID-19, they can be quickly added to the trial. If this happens, the number of people needed in the trial will change.
Further information