CHMP recommends approval of Veklury for COVID-19 (novel coronavirus).- Gilead Sciences

The EU Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has adopted a positive opinion, recommending the granting of a conditional marketing authorisation for the medicinal product Veklury (remdesivir), from Gilead Sciences, intended for the treatment of (SARS-CoV-2), a novel coronavirus causing a respiratory illness designated as coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19.

Remdesivir is the first medicine against COVID-19 to be recommended for authorisation in the EU. Data on remdesivir were assessed in an exceptionally short timeframe through a rolling review procedure, an approach used by EMA during public health emergencies to assess data as they become available. From 30 April 2020, the CHMP began assessing data on quality and manufacturing, non-clinical data, preliminary clinical data and supporting safety data from compassionate use programmes, well in advance of the submission of the marketing authorisation application on 5 June. The assessment of the dossier has now concluded with this recommendation, which is mainly based on data from study NIAID-ACTT-11, sponsored by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), plus supporting data from other studies on remdesivir.

Study NIAID-ACTT-1 evaluated the effectiveness of a planned 10-day course of remdesivir in over 1,000 hospitalised patients with COVID-19. Remdesivir was compared with placebo (a dummy treatment) and the main measure of effectiveness was patients’ time to recovery (defined as no longer being hospitalised and/or requiring home oxygen or being hospitalised but not requiring supplemental oxygen and no longer requiring ongoing medical care). Overall, the study showed that patients treated with remdesivir recovered after about 11 days, compared with 15 days for patients given placebo. This effect was not observed in patients with mild to moderate disease: time to recovery was 5 days for both the remdesivir group and the placebo group. For patients with severe disease, who constituted approximately 90% of the study population, time to recovery was 12 days in the remdesivir group and 18 days in the placebo group. However, no difference was seen in time to recovery in patients who started remdesivir when they were already on mechanical ventilation or ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation). Data on the proportion of patients who died up to 28 days after starting treatment are currently being collected for final analysis.