A novel combination of atovaquone, a drug used to treat malaria, and azithromycin, an antibiotic effective against a variety of bacterial infections, is being tested in clinical trials to treat moderately to severely sick COVID-19 patients at three HonorHealth hospitals in Scottsdale and Phoenix.
Officials say this is the first such trial in the United States and the first trial made available to patients in Arizona that involves this specific combination of therapies.
“We are proud to be supporting this ‘homegrown’ innovation here at the institute, where we have been working with other front line providers, scientists and experts across the globe to bring several COVID-19 trials up in record time to support our patients and providers amid this pandemic,” said HonorHealth Research Institute Chief Operating Officer Kiran Avancha, Ph.D., R.Ph.
Doctors anticipate treating 25 patients in the trial. They say the first, a severely ill woman, is currently receiving the drugs.
Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) North Director and Associate Professor Dave Engelthaler, Ph.D., says the hope is that this combination of drugs will prevent COVID-19 from infecting new cells in patients and use the body’s immune system to help clear out the virus.
“For this particular virus and this disease, it’s not reacting to everybody the same way. We can’t hope that we’re going to find a magic bullet, but with innovation like this we are going to find bullets. We need to use them until we are able to get an effective vaccine in place in the population,” he said in a news conference with HonorHealth doctors on May 5. “It’s this Arizona innovation of a combination of repurposing drugs and collaborations that have been in place and next gen technology that’s going to hopefully give us a few more bullets to be used.”
Officials say atovaquone and azithromycin are expected to be easier on patients and pose less risk of cardiac side effects than other potential COVID-19 treatments.
Co-principal investigator of the trial, HonorHealth Research Institute Medical Director Michael Gordon, M.D., says doctors and scientists don’t understand the virus and cannot explain the difference between patients suffering from moderate to severe symptoms and those who are less sick.
“We know that about 80% of individuals who are infected with COVID-19 will essentially have a moderate to severe flu-like illness that will last up to about two weeks…. Most of those individuals go on to do well. There is a subset, the individuals that have been identified as high risk – over the age of 60, diabetes, uncontrolled hypertension, those with underlying illnesses that may suppress the immune system – who could evolve beyond the scope of just that typical flu-like illness to something more severe. And then, there’s that 15% of patients, roughly, at terms of presentation have a much more, I’ll use the term malignant, progression,” said Gordon.
Additional laboratory studies performed by TGen’s Pathogen and Microbiome Division in Flagstaff, its infectious disease branch, will be able to quantify the virus by counting the amount of virus particles seen in patients, monitor to see if there is a drop in the virus during treatment and measure antibody production. “We’re going to learn more about the immune response and then we’re also able to capture the virus from patient samples and do the genetic sequencing and we can understand how the virus may actually be changing during the course of infection,” said Engelthaler.
With more COVID-19 testing, researchers expect more people will be diagnosed with a milder case of the infection, a slightly severe flu-like illness. “Those are the patients we are thinking about extending the study to,” said Co-Principal Investigator Sunil Sharma, M.D., FACP, MBA, who has dual appointments at HonorHealth Research Institute and TGen. “My gut feeling is there’s going to be a lot of different options that we’ll be reassessing for the best chance of helping patients.”QCBN
By Bonnie Stevens, QCBN
Leave a Reply