It’s different from the vaccines and steroids in use.
Recently, Merck, an American multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in New Jersey, came out with a new treatment for COVID-19. It involves a pill that you swallow orally. The great news is that it can be somewhat effective if taken in the early stages of a COVID-19 infection. Hurray!
The pill can’t promise to save your life but the small capsule has been proven to lower your risk of being hospitalized with the virus.
Named molnupiravir, it’s the first oral treatment available to help fight the novel coronavirus. While the world edges its way through an extended fourth wave of the virus, this remedy is certainly welcome.
Here are some of the basics around how it works and what we know.
Seeking Approval for Emergency Use for Something You Swallow
Merck is said to be seeking approval for emergency use of the drug in the US. This might be given soon. If authorized, it would be the first oral treatment for the novel coronavirus.
This means it’s medicine you swallow, not inject. To date, we have the vaccines that are injected, which stimulate your body to create antibodies to fight off the virus. These work to protect you against severe future infection with COVID-19.
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Of course, the conundrum is that if someone already has a COVID-19 infection, getting the vaccine won’t really help them. It can protect them against reinfection later on. In the short term though, the vaccine won’t save your life.
The steroid dexamethasone is given to those who are already sick as it’s been shown to help reduce patient’s chances of dying from the virus by one third, which is highly significant.
If approved for emergency use, Merck’s oral antiviral might go so far as to cut COVID-19 patients’ risk of dying by a whopping 50%. This is certainly something that can help infected patients in the present.
Targeting the Tools the Virus Uses to Copy Itself
Vaccines work by getting your body to attack the coronavirus’ spike protein, which sits on the outside of the virus. This new oral antiviral is different. Molnupiravir works by targeting an enzyme that the virus causing COVID-19 uses to replicate. This means the treatment targets the system the virus uses to make copies of itself. It slows it down.
In trials, the new drug has been shown to potentially cut the number of COVID-19 deaths drastically. This being said, the drug has only been trialed in hundreds of people so far. More extensive trials are certainly needed to show us its exact powers.
Regardless, it does seem that molnupiravir could present us with a more promising future. It needs to be taken early on, soon after a patient develops symptoms of the novel coronavirus, to be effective. Unfortunately, once things get bad, it doesn’t really do much, the trials suggested.
Merck’s president, Daria Hazuda, had prominent words on the topic. She stated to BBC.com,
“An antiviral treatment for people who are not vaccinated, or who are less responsive to immunity from vaccines, is a very important tool in helping to end this pandemic.”
Indeed.
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photo credits: Cryptographer/Shutterstock.com
