Arizona doctors hope two drugs could be used for COVID-19 treatment
May 6, 2020, 4:45 AM | Updated: May 7, 2020, 1:49 pm
PHOENIX — A group of Arizona doctors believes two well-known drugs could team up to make one treatment to fight the coronavirus.
Arizona-based Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) will run a clinical trial with HonorHealth and 25 of its sickest COVID-19 patients, doctors from both entities announced in an online video conference Tuesday.
Atovaquone, which is an anti-malarial drug, and the antibiotic, azithromycin, commonly known as Z-Pak, fight pneumonia and other viruses.
“In case they ended up in the ICU, intubated and on a ventilator, where we could continue to administer the drug without having to change the formulation,” Dr. Michael Gordon, medical director at HonorHealth Research Institute, said.
To use the drugs together to fight the coronavirus, patients would receive a liquid combination of the two.
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“There is an objective scoring system that we use, based on the patient’s oxygenation status, temperature, etc., to come up with the definition of who’s moderately and who’s severely ill,” TGen deputy director Dr. Sunil Sharma said.
“Atovaquone would have anti-infectious, anti-viral activities,” Gordon said. “The azithromycin is an antibiotic known to have some antiviral activity on respirator epithelial cells on the lining of the lungs.”
HonorHealth’s study with TGen will also measure how quickly the patients recover and how the drug combo does against different strains of the Coronavirus.
This combination drug joins the mix of others in development.
Co-Director of TGen’s Pathogen and Microbiome Division, Dr. David Engelthaler, says there is no single “magic bullet.”
“We can’t think that we’re going to find one drug that’s going to treat everyone and get rid of this,” Engelthaler said. “This virus is reacting differently in different people.”
Engelthaler also says his team and others may need to modify treatments and vaccines for COVID-19’s strains.
“We do see some mutations showing up causing different strains, different lineages of the virus to move around,” he said.
Medications in development, like TGen’s possible combo of an anti-malarial and an antibiotic, could bridge the gap until a vaccine is produced.
