Mesa lab looking for participants to take part in trials for COVID-19 therapeutic pills

PHOENIX — A Mesa lab is looking for people willing to participate in a study to develop COVID-19 therapeutic pills.

Arizona Clinical Trials in Mesa hopes the therapeutic pills complement the vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments against COVID-19.

The lab wants people who have been exposed or even infected by COVID-19, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.

“They would receive treatment for 3-5 days with these new anti-virals, and be monitored to see if their symptoms are getting better or not, and whether they’ve developed COVID if they’ve been exposed to it,” Dr. Anita Kohli, director of clinical research at the lab, told KTAR News 92.3 FM.

Labs across the country are running their own trials and are expected to share the results. The trials will run for at least a year.

“Even a year is unbelievably fast for being able to do this,” Kohli said.

“This requires the coordination of many different sites of regulatory agencies to run trials quickly, analyze the data and make the drugs available to the general public.”

She considers vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments highly effective, but as health experts like her have said, they won’t prevent all severe illnesses and deaths.

“The same thing happens with influenza every year,” Kohli said. “People get vaccinated for flu, and a handful of people will still get very sick.

“That’s why we have anti-virals.”

Labs like hers want to develop anti-viral pills from Pfizer and Merck to stop COVID-19 from replicating.

“All the data is combined from different sites and analyzed centrally,” Kohli said. “Then, the pharmaceutical companies will get all of the data and analyze it.”

These anti-virals work differently than drugs like Regeneron which binds and neutralizes viruses.

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