General news from Sunday, February 28, 2021
Source: GNA
2021-02-28
Pyramax is also being tested in South Africa, Kenya and Burkina Faso to collect African efficacy data
The pre-qualified World Health Organization and the Food and Drug Authority of Ghana registered the Pyramx Antimalarial (Artesunate-Pironaridine), a fixed dose combination medicine for the treatment of malaria, has been approved for clinical trials for Covid-19 in South Korea.
In addition, it is being tested in South Africa, Kenya and Burkina Faso to collect African efficacy data.
The study, which is being conducted by the Liverpool School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has the main objective of comparing and evaluating the effectiveness and safety of Pyramax in the treatment of patients infected with coronavirus, especially mild to moderate covid-19 infection and viral clearance (negative nasal smear) on Day 7.
Despite several drug development efforts, only vaccines led by AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and, more recently, Sputnik V have been approved for the management of COVID-19.
Efforts for the drug treatment of COVID-19 are still ongoing. Nevertheless, several drug molecules, including drugs already approved for other diseases, are emerging as providing benefits for the treatment of patients with COVID-19.
Between October 2020 to date, Sars-CoV-2 has manifested itself in three different variants of the original virus for which some vaccines have been produced.
These mutations include B.1.1351 (501Y.V2) from South Africa, 501Y.V3 in Brazil and B.1.1.7 (501Y.V1) from the United Kingdom.
Following the higher transmissible nature of the N501Y mutation familiar to all of these variants in South Africa, Brazil and the United Kingdom, the projected impact of vaccines needs to be revised, since highly transmissible variants lead to an exponential growth in the number of infections.
This requires considering alternative ways of developing drugs, in addition to vaccines.
Some drug molecules such as pironaridine, synthesized in 1970 at the Chinese Parasitic Disease Institute, have been used in China for more than 30 years to treat malaria.
Pironaridine has been approved as an orphan drug for the control of Ebola in different parts of the world and shows promise in the fight against COVID-19 for its antiviral properties.
In vitro studies comparing pironaridine, artesunate and hydroxychloroquine with SARS-COV-2 show that pironaridine-artesunate is more potent than hydroxychloroquine in the epithelial cell line of the human lung.
Artesunate, on the other hand, has similar antiviral properties and offers anti-inflammatory effects that suggest its potential usefulness in the treatment of COVID-19. The estimated completion date of the study is September 30, 2021.
In 2017, Pyramax, an oral drug produced as a result of a collaboration between Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), University of Iowa and Shin Poong Pharm, a South Korean pharmaceutical company specializing in neglected tropical diseases, was included in Pediatric Essential and adult WHO drug lists for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria.
To improve accessibility in low- and middle-income countries, the Global Fund has also included Pyramax in its list of medicines.
Internationally, Pyramax is registered in 26 countries with a high rate of malaria and registered locally by the Ghanaian Food and Drug Authority since March 2020 for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria.