Asian Institute of Gastroenterology, Hyderabad has always been a frontier in the field of gastroenterology. It is now paving path to set a new milestone in cure of coronavirus disease.
The institute is conducting one of the largest research study to determine if the therapy is efficacious against the highly infectious Delta Covid variant. As part of the trials, a group of 40 Covid patients were given a single-dose drug cocktail of monoclonal antibodies here. “In 24 hours, they recovered from clinical symptoms like fever, malaise etc,” stated chairperson of the hospital, Dr Nageshwar Reddy.
Dr Nageshwar said, experiments held in the US are said to have shown good results against the British variant, Brazilian and South African variants. Till date, there were very few studies to prove that a medicine could act against many variants with equal effectiveness. But the doctor iterated, apart from the aforementioned variants, his team has tested it against the Delta variant we have in the nation.
“what we are doing is that we are parallelly testing whether it is effective against the mutant virus. Results that we have now in 40 patients who we analysed after one week. almost in 100 per cent (cases), the virus disappeared when we did RT-PCR(sic),”, he added.
Casirivimab and Indevimab are the two medicines that were used synergistically for the monoclonal antibody therapy, costing around ₹ 70,000 or 1000 US dollars in India.