05/27/2020- With doctors and researchers around the world searching for effective treatments for COVID-19, many drugs approved to treat other diseases are being used in hopes that they’ll be effective against the virus, a use that’s known as “off-label”. New research from the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL) and CDCN catalogued every use documented in medical literature so far and found physicians have reported on the use of more than 100 different off-label and experimental treatments. The effort, called COvid19 Registry of Off-label & New Agents (CORONA), is an attempt to take an inventory of what’s being used where, as well as to spot any evidence of treatments that warrant further investigation in a randomized clinical trial.
“With the world facing its greatest public health crisis in a century, we decided to take action, using the same approach that helped me and applying it to potentially help find promising leads in the treatment of COVID-19,” Fajgenbaum said.
The team reviewed about 2,700 published papers from all over the world detailing the treatment of COVID-19. From there, they gathered data on 9,152 patients and found doctors had tried 115 different drugs. These treatments were grouped into categories – antivirals were unsurprisingly the most common, followed by antibacterials and corticosteroids. The analysis also showed the use of immunosuppressants and blood substitutes, among other treatment options. David C. Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, assistant professor of Translational Medicine & Human Genetics and director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL) at Penn, was the lead author of this study. Sheila Pierson, MS, the associate director for clinical research at the CSTL, director of registry enrollment for the CDCN, and the study’s senior author, led the analysis of the data.
“Our team has spent the last several years studying drugs used to control the cytokine storm in Castleman disease, so I’m glad we were able to apply these principles to COVID19. The work remains ongoing, and we are updating this drug inventory daily as we continue to compile information on other treatments as they’re being reported in the medical literature,” Pierson said.
Additional Penn-affiliated authors and contributors on the study include Johnson Khor, Alek Gorzewski, Mark-Avery Tamakloe, Victoria Powers, Joseph J. Kakkis, Mileva Repasky, Alexander Beschloss, Laura Hernandez-Miyares, Beatrice Go, Vivek Nimgaonkar, Casey Kim, Erin Napier, Ruth-Anne Langan Pai, Sarah Frankl, Philip Angelides, Joanna Jiang, Rozena Rasheed, Duncan Mackay, Anna Wing, Michael Mayer, James Germi, Ashwin Amurthur, and Eric Rodriguez-Lopez.
*Adapted from Penn Communications Press Release
Donate to support our mission