A new Covid medicine shows key benefits over Paxlovid in the problem

January 03, 2023: -A new medication for Covid was discovered to be as effective as Paxlovid at curbing low to moderate illness among all people at high risk of the disease in a Phase 3 trial in China.

On Wednesday, the results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, state that the treatment had lesser side effects than Paxlovid, the go-to antiviral for patients at the chance. Nearly 67% of people who took the experimental pill, known as VV116, reported side effects, compared to 77% who took Paxlovid.

The new pill was less likely than Paxlovid to cause unexpected side effects because of the reactions with different medications, such as those for insomnia, seizures or high blood pressure.

“You have a medication that looks just as good as Paxlovid but less cumbersome,” Dr Panagis Galiatsatos stated, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.

VV116 is the antiviral redeliver, which the Food and Drug Administration approved as an IV infusion. But the team behind the recent drug pharma companies Junshi Biosciences and Vigonvita Life Science tweaked the formula so that the body absorbs it in pill form, stated Dr Peter Gulick, an associate professor of the medicines at Michigan State University. Gilead Sciences, developing redeliver, is testing a similarly oral version of its drug.

Gulick said people who have gotten intravenous remdesivir thus far had not seen their symptoms in the days or weeks after the treatment the way people have with Paxlovid.

In the trial of VV116, over 380 people took the experimental drug, while that sized group took Paxlovid. Both treatment courses lasted five days.

The median time to recovery, defined as no Covid ideas for two consecutive days, was four days for VV116 people and five days for those taking Paxlovid. After four weeks, nearly 98% of all participants had recovered, and no one was creating severe Covid.

Study Ren Zhao, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, recognised the trial as a “great success” in a Thursday news release.

Regarding specific side effects, nearly 26% of the trial participants who took Paxlovid stated that it altered their sense of taste food which tastes sour, sweet, bitter or metallic, but just 4% of people who took VV116 stated that experience. Although a few people in both groups had elevated levels of triglycerides, a smaller share of those in the VV116 group experienced that effect, 11%, compared to 21% of people who took Paxlovid.

That decreasing likelihood of side effects is “a big deal,” Galiatsatos states.