The Institut Pasteur de Lille is launching the test phase on patients of a treatment with suppositories against Covid-19, after having obtained the green light from the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines, we learned Monday from of its direction.
This clinical trial will be carried out initially on "a few hundred patients", over the age of 50, unvaccinated and presenting at least one symptom of Covid-19, Professor Xavier Nassif told AFP, Director General of the Institute, confirming information from the newspaper La Voix du Nord.
For this "randomized double-blind, placebo-drug trial", patients, recruited from this week through general practitioners and laboratories, first exclusively in Hauts-de-France, will take a morning suppository and evening for five days.
If the results show a 50% reduction in the risk of worsening with treatment, a marketing authorization will be requested.
Authorization from the National Medicines Safety Agency expected since January
"The ideal would have been to do this test during a wave, before people are vaccinated," said Professor Nassif, while the Institute had been waiting since January for the authorization of the National Security Agency. medicine to start it.
In October, the Institute announced that it had received a donation of five million euros from the luxury giant LVMH to finance the clinical trial of a molecule which, tested in vitro, proved "particularly effective against the SARS virus. Cov-2 ”.
This molecule, belonging to the category of antivirals and used in a drug which is currently available "only in certain European countries", had been identified by a start-up specializing in the repositioning of drugs, hosted by the Institute. Pastor.