Gilead Exploring Outpatient Version of Experimental Virus Drug

Gilead Sciences Inc. is exploring ways to make its experimental Covid-19 medicine more broadly available, potentially treating patients in the outpatient setting, the company’s CEO said Friday.

Preliminary data released this week by the National Institutes of Health showed promising signs that remdesivir can speed up the recovery time for Covid-19 patients. But that study only tested the drug on the patients with a severe form of the disease, who received a daily infusion over 10 days. Daniel O’Day, Gilead’s CEO, said on NBC the company is looking at different ways of administering the medicine to make it available to more patients.

“Maybe we can treat patients earlier in the hospital setting and perhaps even outside of the hospital setting,” O’Day said, adding the company is looking at ways to develop an injected version or one that can be inhaled orally. “Our scientists are hard at work to see—now that we know that this medicine has an impact on patients—if we can bring it earlier into the disease.”

O’Day’s comments, which marked one of his first televised appearances, come as an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration is expected to come any day now. That would allow the drug to be used during the public health emergency.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told Bloomberg News on Thursday the agency is working at lightning speed to review the clinical trial data on remdesivir. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also has said he expects an emergency authorization to happen quickly.

“I expect that they’re going to act very quickly, and we are prepared as a company to make sure we get this medicine to as many patients as possible as soon as possible after that” authorization, O’Day said.

There are about half a dozen clinical trials testing remdesivir, two of which are focused on patients with more moderate forms of the disease. One of those trials is still recruiting and would still administer remdesivir intravenously. Recruiting on another study in China also had an IV version of remdesivir. That trial has been suspended because “the epidemic of COVID-19 has been controlled well at present, no eligible patients can be” recruited, according to the ClinicalTrials.gov listing.

A course of treatment for remdesivir under the NIH study was 10 days. O’Day said there are about 100,000 treatment courses available today and he expects to have millions of treatment courses available by the end of the year.

“I can assure you that we’re all focused on making sure we make this accessible and affordable to patients around the globe. That’s what’s going to drive us, and we take our responsibility very seriously,” he said.