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Pfizer is testing a pill that, if successful, could cure Covid-19
- ascorbic 5y agoThis article is a syndicated copy. This is the source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/revealed-home-cure-covid-could-available-year/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
- adamrezich 5y agoblows my mind to see nearly every single comment here being overtly positive—bordering on unconditional reverence—with regards to this massive pharmaceutical corporation. apparently we just trust everything they say these days? skepticism is just off-limits for these guys? when did this happen?
- ceilingcorner 5y agoHacker News is a misnomer. No one here understands what actual hacker values are/were.
- mromanuk 5y agoThere is a video Ad popup or something that keeps appearing after I hit close, how do they expect a user will read the article with an annoying and distracting video next to it? Awful UX.
- michaeltimo 5y agoUS/CA/UK now have another thing to hoard, nice. RIP the rest of world.
- sabersei2 5y agoWhy taking a pill when you could just TRASH YOUR TV?
- mvzvm 5y agoActual title: "Pfizer is testing a pill that, if successful, could become first-ever home cure for COVID-19" - Edited down as best as I could to fit the length.
- swader999 5y agoGargling and snorting mouthwash until this is ready. https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/8/1289/5878067 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/8/1289/5878067
- tdeck 5y agoPerhaps consider a Carbolic Smoke Ball as well!
- the-pigeon 5y agoNot necessarily. That is just testing if COVID19 breaks down when exposed to mouth wash. For that to prevent infection you'd need contact between the mouthwash and the virus. So maybe mouth wash helps or maybe it's useless because people are getting infected in their nose or before they use mouthwash. Pretty hard to say but this study doesn't tell you anything actionable.
- swader999 5y agoN=1 but I already stopped a cold that seemed to be developing this past weekend. Fairly harmless to try at the onset of feeling something starting.
- cmckn 5y agoThis SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor is the latest scientific overlap of COVID and HIV -- I am so hopeful that cross pollination will (continue to) lead to breakthroughs for both diseases.
- cmckn 5y agoThe clinical trial in question: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04756531 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04756531 The related intravenous antiviral: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04535167 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04535167
- dylan604 5y ago"clean-living adults" A phrase I was totally unfamiliar with, and not really sure of what it means in context. Non recreational drug users? Non-McDonalds eaters? Only eats nonGMO, organic foods? Bathes regularly?
- ta9999 5y agoMaybe something to do with household cleanliness? I know when I go into dirty buildings my allergies mess me up.
- icegreentea2 5y agoNot sure exactly where they got that from, but here's the registry for the US phase 1 trial (https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04756531 https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04756531) The last condition of the exclusion criteria is "Use of tobacco or nicotine containing products in excess of the equivalents of 5 cigarettes per day or 2 chews of tobacco per day", which seems somewhat related.
- whymauri 5y agoI wonder what the metabolic argument is (if any). Maybe it's something else. Really interesting regardless -- anyone know why there's this restriction?
- dylan604 5y agoCOVID has a serious effect on one's lungs. Smoking does as well. I'm sure they would prefer to see how the medicine works on healthy subjects as a baseline. If it doesn't have the same effect on smokers as the baseline, then you can infer from that. If you just get tainted samples from "diseased" lungs of smokers in the original testing, then that could skew the results. That would be my SWAG.
- whymauri 5y agoTrue, true. Maybe the chewing tobacco is meant to be a proxy for smoking earlier in life.
- johnchristopher 5y agoTotally OT: that video pop-up, you click the close button and it disappears but as soon as you scroll it reappears. Evil.
- jszymborski 5y agoWelcome to the hell that is Postmedia websites. It's not suffice that all of Canada's local newspapers were acquired by one giant conglomerate and is slowly killing them off, but they've also make some of the worst website experiences.
- johnchristopher 5y agoAh, that also explains why when I looked at the top of the page to find which website/newspaper it is my attention was drawn to the two imposing CTAs (manage subscriptions and signup). Also, the video covers up some parts of the text, which is the reason I want to close it.
- kecupochren 5y agoThings like that make me so irrationally angry. News websites are the worst
- adrianmonk 5y agoI hated that too, but I assumed it was incompetence rather than malice. If you want an uncloseable video, it's a lot easier to just not put a close button on it.
- barbs 5y agoI refused to read the rest of the article because it irritated me so much. Here is an article on the same thing, but at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissaholzberg/2021/03/23/pfizer-testing-oral-covid-treatment---would-be-first-to-market/?sh=4eead81f5759 https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissaholzberg/2021/03/23/pfiz...
- gnicholas 5y ago> Every detail has been specified in advance. In Phase 3, for example, a high-fat breakfast is defined as: “2 eggs fried in butter, 2 strips of pork bacon, 2 slices of toast with butter, 4 oz. of hash brown potatoes, and 8 oz. of whole milk… eaten in 20 minutes”. Quite some details! Presumably this part of the testing is to see if large amounts of fat shouldn't be consumed along with the pill.
- css 5y agoI cannot imagine consuming that much food that quickly... what is this supposed to represent? - 2 eggs: 150 cal - 2 bacon strips: 50 cal - 2 toast slices: 150 cal - 4oz hash brown: 370 cal - 8 oz whole milk: 100 cal Before butter and oil, that's over 800 calories...
- jollybean 5y agoBacon more than 50 cal. That's breakfast of champions right there, what we all wold like to think we could get away with eating ...
- hprotagonist 5y agowhen i was 20, “monday”.
- tedunangst 5y agoTwo minutes to eat an egg or strip of bacon doesn't seem impossible.
- gnicholas 5y agoI could easily eat one egg or one strip of bacon in 2 minutes. That doesn't mean I could repeat it 8-10 times without discomfort.
- tomjakubowski 5y ago8-10 times, what do you mean? There are only two of each in this meal.
- sradman 5y agoThe March 23 press release Pfizer Initiates Phase 1 Study of Novel Oral Antiviral Therapeutic Agent Against SARS-CoV-2 https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-initiates-phase-1-study-novel-oral-antiviral https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
- gnicholas 5y ago> Pfizer is keeping schtum about the detail of the lab tests it has completed but says it has demonstrated “potent in vitro antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2”, as well as activity against other coronaviruses, raising the prospect of a cure for the common cold as well as future pandemic threats. I have wondered if the COVID-19 pandemic might lead to some results, like extermination of the common cold, that humans would look back on and say that it was a net benefit. Something along the lines of, "yes, 4 million people died, but in fighting COVID-19 we created highly-effective therapeutics for the flu and common cold. Over the following 10 years, these inventions saved 4 million lives and saved 15 million days of lost work/school". It's hard to think about these things as we are going through the pandemic, but hopefully there will be some good that comes of it. (Of course, it's also possible that by thinking we've 'cured' the common cold, we will open ourselves up to a once-a-century pandemic, where millions are wiped out by what used to just be a common cold.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bbb2019 5y agoThanks to the pandemic, Ivermectin, a widely-used anti-parasite that won the Nobel prize for virtually eliminating river blindness (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/press-releas...), a medicine on the the WHO essential medicine list, which has shown broad-spectrum antiviral properties in the lab (zika, dengue, west nile virus, covid and more https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7564151/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7564151/), has also proven very effective against preventing and treating sars-cov-2 virus in vivo: https://ivmmeta.com/ https://ivmmeta.com/ The probability that ivermectin generated results as positive as the 52 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 85 trillion (p = 0.000000000000012). A doctor who thought they had covid, took ivermectin and turned out their covid results were negative, but it still aided their recovery for the flu. Dr. Pierre Kory gave an excellent discussion on the latest scientific findings of ivermectin as as a treatment for covid and general antiviral treatment on John Campbell's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19DPijOoVKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19DPijOoVKE Personally, I think a drug with 37 years safety data makes a more promising candidate than a novel therapeutic that is rushed to the market.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago> The trial is split into three phases and will run for 145 days, with another 28 days added for “screening and dosing”. For all participants, there will be several overnight stays. Let's not get too excited...
- whoomp12342 5y agoI am getting excited. They are doing really strong due diligence which will only increase public trust and confidence. If it fails, then oh well, atleast we tried.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoOh for sure they're doing exactly what they should do, but America will likely be approaching vaccine-induced herd immunity by the time the FDA begins to consider the results of these trials. It may have a bigger impact in other nations, but hopefully they'll have ramped up their vaccine programmes in the next 6 months.
- whoomp12342 5y agogood, I would like to travel soon. my back yard has gotten very boring.
- brightball 5y agoApparently Sorrento Therapeutics already has a cure that’s bogged down by testing. I guess they don’t have the connections to fast track it.
- mvzvm 5y agoThis is an oddly pessimistic view - what are you implying?
- lostcolony 5y agoWhat are you on about? They're actively testing Sorrento's treatment, yes (it's not 'a cure'; it -is- a treatment for those in the ICU. It's an infusion). This pill is also 'bogged down by testing'; if testing is successful it will be available later this year. Sorrento's treatment is going into phase 2; this pill is just entering phase 1. Sorrento also got $34 million from DARPA for their treatment, I might add. Is this just a general "Rargh, drugs shouldn't take so much testing!" complaint, or are you asserting that Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J are getting preferential treatment that Sorrento isn't?
- brightball 5y agoFrom what I have been reading, it’s saved the lives of everybody who it’s been given to so far but I haven’t seen much coverage of it outside of the stock reports. Just struck me as odd that it’s bogged down in more testing when it seems to have a near perfect record. Blows my mind that India and Brazil aren’t begging for it considering the scope of their current situations. After following it for the last year, suddenly seeing the Pfizer option out of nowhere just struck me as odd.
- perardi 5y agoYou better have an actual citation for this miracle drug. Because this sounds a bit like remdesivir, one of the earlier candidates for a savior drug that, once we had more statistical power, didn’t really pan out. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2007764 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2007764 Also, if it’s an IV infusion, in a poorer country with a massively strained health care system…well, good luck actually deploying it.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago> Pfizer is keeping schtum about the detail of the lab tests I love journalism because I often learn new words to improve my communication at work. “Keeping schtum” is not an idiom I’ve ever heard before but I will certainly consider using it with my colleagues.
- gaogao 5y agoCyberRabbi, you should brush up more on your Yiddish for schmoozing. As a side note on Germanic loans, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of ersatz at work for my hacks.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoOh wow schtum is German? I just assumed it was English. You learn something new every day. Ersatz is a good one, I gotta use that. Thanks for sharing :)
- CodesInChaos 5y agoThe German word "stumm" means silent or mute.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoWait I thought it was schtum?
- rthomas6 5y agoIt's Yiddish
- cwkoss 5y agoDo drug R&D departments do off the books clandestine testing of compounds to screen them before moving onto the official testing steps? With the expense of testing being so huge, it seems like there would be huge economic incentive to be able to fail fast. I wonder what percentage of pharma researchers are bold (and unmonitored) enough to test their creations on themselves - based on the chemists I've met, it almost certainly must be nonzero...
- whymauri 5y agoI like to think that medicinal chemists are self-aware enough to not ingest anything they design, lol. There'd certainly be a lot more corpses than drugs in the market with self-testing. In either case, I've definitely considered injecting myself with optogenetics expressing virus to skip a few decades of R&D.
- Ovah 5y agoThis guy CRISPR'd himself.. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/diy-dna-hacks-wounds-take-longer-to-heal-at-night-why-daydreams-are-good-quirks-bombs-and-more-1.4395576/meet-the-human-guinea-pig-who-hacked-his-own-dna-1.4395589 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/diy-dna-hacks-wounds-take-lo...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- totony 5y agoAFAIK a lot of drugs can be fairly assumed to be mostly safe (aka won't kill you), although they may have long-term/non-lethal effects. So testing your own drugs wouldn't be creating that much corpses as long as you know what you're doing.
- 1986 5y agoHey, it worked for Albert Hofmann!
- COGlory 5y agoThen there's Alexander Shulgin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL
- rossdavidh 5y agoAwesome! They should totally go all out investigating this. The rest of us should totally not get too excited. Many drugs go into phase 1. Few come out. There are more phases after that. Tamiflu got through all of that and still hasn't been a game-changer for something that kills tens of thousands in the U.S.A. alone every year. But, hey, you have to take a lot of shots on goal before you get one, so I'm glad they're going after it with a sense of urgency.
- symlinkk 5y agoWhich phases did the vaccine go through?
- rossdavidh 5y agoNot sure why the downvotes, it's a legitimate question. So there's a phase to see if there are huge side-effects in humans, then a phase to see what dosage to use for effectiveness, then a larger (tens of thousands) phase to get enough data to justify using it on millions of people. I think there are normally more phases after that when you're not in a pandemic.
- sp332 5y agoWhich vaccine?
- epgui 5y agoThey all went through at least phase III, even Russia's Sputnik vaccine (even though they announced it as a success before they had their phase III completed).
- ascorbic 5y agoThe Merck/Pasteur vaccine was abandoned after stage 1. The Sanofi vaccine had poor stage 1 results, but they seem to be indicating that they plan to continue development with a much later projected laucnh date. I don't know if that is because they mean they're trying a different candidate entirely or if they're making changes to the failed one.
- nyolfen 5y agoit turns out hcq is actually quite effective, shame it got culture-war'd: https://c19hcq.com/ https://c19hcq.com/
- chowells 5y agoIs the culture war the thing where over 120 studies found it had no value over placebo? Weird name for it, but yeah. Hydroxy chloroquine was found to be totally ineffective in 95% of studies. That's exactly as you'd expect with a p < 0.05 publication threshold.
- nyolfen 5y agoperhaps you should take a look at the link; there is even a nice meta analysis https://hcqmeta.com/ https://hcqmeta.com/
- manwe150 5y agoAs a layman, my main observation with the link is they seem to be computing a statistical measures over the studies to get a meta-result. But that isn't necessarily a statistically valid methodology, for the following reason: it is like if someone gave you a bunch of grapes and and apple, and asked you to estimate the average size of apples. If you simply averaged all of the fruit given, you might end up claiming they are about the size of a quarter. But if you look closer, some of those samples might have larger significance and be more useful than the others. That doesn't necessarily mean the site is invalid or its conclusions, and I don't personally care much which "side" is right. But does that analogy help explain why this can be a tricky problem, and why many here, including myself, defer to "experts" like the NIH (who ran one of the largest studies of hcq)?
- manwe150 5y agoA few of the more highly touted studies I read even showed that early use of hcq by mildly sick individuals at home had better outcomes when compared against already hospitalized people who were already very ill sick with covid, regardless of their later treatment. But when larger studies were done that actually tried to compare apples-to-apples, they didn't show much effect. I agree, that is an odd thing to call a "culture war", unless he meant science against wishful thinking? And hcq perhaps may even have some effect, but just not one worth the cost of the drug and the risk from missing out on better treatments that are available. I wonder why OP wants to believe in hcq, if they'd like to respond?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- The_rationalist 5y agoThis one is also promising: https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/debiopharm-begins-alisporivir-france/ https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/debiopharm-begins-a... as an aside it is also potent against hepatite C and Myopathies (related to collagen VI)
- aurizon 5y agoWell, if it inhibits, it needs to be renewed at the same rate it is consumed to maintain the inhibition. Thus a saturation dose(freezes ALL that protease inhibition needs to be administered.) The body will degrade/metabolise/excrete this protease = an effective half life. The body's adaptive immune system will also increase to block various aspects of the ways and means the virus uses to reproduce = might block the protease or might stop it being made. In any event this will be a good adjunct to a vaccine to freeze the virus in t's tracks until it can be killed.
- ck2 5y agoEver have one of those experiences in life where you write people off as "conspiracy nuts" until you have to deal with the issue yourself so in desperation you try their crazy? Well there's no way to convince the disbelievers but Ivermectin is already a cure for covid, weak and imperfect but it definitely does something. I know and believe only because it personally saved me from death's door. Don't try mentioning this on twitter or facebook though, you'll get your account blocked/banned. Funding for a more targeted and powerful cure definitely should happen but there is something really really weird in life when you see something being buried that you know is different than the official stroy. Doesn't help that every quack is coming out of the woodwork to try to cash in on it somehow, not by profit from the drug itself but their only 15 minutes of "fame". But there has to be someway to fix that signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to saving people's lives.
- ramraj07 5y agoSo you took it when you had Covid and you didn’t die so you conclude it works? You realize that the most likely thing to happen for anyone at almost any stage of Covid is to actually get better right? You took a powerful anti parasitic drug and decided the default course of action was the result of this drug? This is like saying you broke your arm and prayed to god and you’re alive so god saved you.
- ck2 5y agolook I'm not going to sit here and argue with some random person on the internet (and fwiw I'm atheist) I was literally in your disbelieving shoes and I still don't know how to convince people or if I even want to waste the effort trying https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261036/figure/Fig2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261036/figure/... just sit back for a moment and consider the possibility you are being lied to not by consipiracy but rather much easier apathy and ivermectin actually has proven antiviral properties that actually do something, just not specifically targeted to covid19 so it's not a "miracle" by any means I was not just sick with covid, I was at death's door. Steroids were not doing anything/enough and pneumonia/clots were destroying my lungs. This was very early on in the pandemic and there were no treatments available. Again, I've got nothing to prove, I don't expect people are going to listen, I'm just putting this on the record. Something's up with this being not just dismissed but buried.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thedeepdive 5y agoPfizer is certainly becoming the leader here against COVID it would seem!
- Camillo 5y agoFWIW, a recent clinical trial appeared to show that nitrous oxide is an effective treatment for Covid-19: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210315005197/en/UK-Clinical-Trial-Confirms-SaNOtize https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210315005197/en/UK-... Would be pretty cool if we had a pill that was, say, 20% more effective and 300 times more expensive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- forgingahead 5y agoPlot twist: The pill is called hydroxycholroquine.
- thewileyone 5y agoIs Pfizer taking advantage the emergency declaration to fast-track this pill? If yes, we need to be wary. Remember, there's no value to Pfizer to cure things like the common cold.