The shares of Gilead Sciences Inc climbed in early trading Friday after a report that a group of Coronavirus patients being treated with its drug Remdsivir in Chicago, were “seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms.”
The report, from the medical news publication Stat, cited a video made by a researcher at the University of Chicago who is helping conduct a trial of Gilead’s drug remdesivir. The researcher, infectious disease professor Kathleen Mullane, said that most patients had been discharged from the hospital and only two had died, according to Stat.
Gilead’s drug is one of the most-watched therapies being studied for treatment of Covid-19 patients. It’s conducting two trials of the drug in moderate and severe patients, with the goal of enrolling 4,000 people in the trials.
The University of Chicago enrolled 125 patients, most of whom had severe disease, according to Stat.
Shares of the company surged 10% in trading before the market opened Friday. The stock has been one of the few to buck the global market rout as the outbreak spread, with shares adding 18% this year through Thursday on optimism for its Covid-19 treatment, while the S&P 500 fell 13%.
The Chicago results are a tiny but promising sliver of the overall trial. Almost all patients recover from the disease, which has made it important to conduct tests which compare treatments against a placebo.
Research on remdesivir’s potential to treat Covid-19 first began in February, at the peak of China’s virus outbreak. Chinese researchers had initially planned to enroll more than 700 patients in Wuhan with mild to severe symptoms to evaluate the drug’s safety and efficacy and said it would announce the trial results on April 27.
Researchers have collected information from the first 400 patients enrolled in the trial and Gilead plans to “lock” the data on Thursday, meaning the results could come soon, Stat said.
