Drugmakers join global peers in race to fill the gaps in COVID-19 strategies

Chinese drugmakers are working with global counterparts in the race to find game-changing treatments for COVID-19 and help nations recover faster from the pandemic.

Some candidate treatments have shown promising results in clinical trials throughout Latin America.

The region's diverse population of more than 600 million people offers Chinese pharmaceutical companies with deep technical expertise the ideal conditions to conduct clinical trials.

"As we continue to grapple with the global effects of this pandemic, including increased incidence of disease based on current and newly emerging variants, it is imperative that we prioritize and progress the development of safe and effective therapies for the prevention of severe disease," said Eric Daar, a doctor at the Lundquist Institute of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in the United States.

Daar is a co-lead investigator for BRII-196/BRII-198, a COVID-19 treatment being developed by Brii Biosciences, a biotech company headquartered in China and the US. The treatment is in late-stage clinical trials around the world, including in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Argentina and Mexico.

Some 350 phase III clinical trials of COVID-19 treatments are taking place. One such trial that has just concluded was conducted by US drugmaker Merck, which, together with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, developed molnupiravir, a ribonucleoside analog that inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The treatment has already received emergency use approval in the United Kingdom. Emergency use applications are being reviewed by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Union's European Medicines Agency.

Many pharmaceutical companies assess their drugs across Latin America, and Brii Biosciences is not the only biotech firm drawing on Chinese expertise to conduct clinical trials for COVID-19 treatment in the region.

Kintor Pharma, from Suzhou, is also moving forward with its own effort, a treatment involving the Proxalutamide drug, originally designed to treat breast and prostate cancers.

Different way

"It is a completely different way to think about how to tackle the virus.... most people think of vaccines or they think of antivirals, but this (drug) fundamentally changes how the virus enters the cell," said Andy Goren, president and chief medical officer at Applied Biology, a California-based biotech firm. The company partnered with Kintor Pharma and other Chinese scientists to scale up findings on Proxalutamide's effects and proceed to clinical trials.

"It is not an antiviral; it is sort of a blocker of the virus to enter the cell. It just stops the virus from being able to enter the cell and it is very effective in that," said Goren.

Kintor Pharma is conducting clinical trials in China, the United States, the Philippines and Brazil－where it received clearance for the trials from ANVISA, the country's healthcare surveillance agency, in late September.

The company expects approval of the trial to pave the way for the treatment's emergency use authorization and eventual commercialization in Brazil. The country has recorded over 22 million cases of COVID-19 among its population of more than 212 million people since the pandemic began.

"We have been planning to conduct the pivotal multiregional clinical trial of Proxalutamide for the treatment of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in more than 10 countries," Tong Youzhi, the founder, chairman and chief executive of Kintor Pharma, said in a statement.

The company has already received clearance for emergency use by the regulator in Paraguay for use of the drug.

Goren believes it is necessary to test these COVID-19 drugs in different locations, which "allows you to study the different demographics, with different patients" given genetic differences between people.

The writer is a freelance journalist for China Daily.