Remdesivir: First Approval
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Funding: The preparation of this review was not supported by any external funding.
Authorship and conflicts of interest: Yvette Lamb is a salaried employee of Adis International Ltd/Springer Nature and declares no relevant conflicts of interest. All authors contributed to the review and are responsible for the article content.
Ethics approval, Consent to participate and consent for publication, Availability of data and material, Code availability: Not applicable.
Additional information about this Adis Drug Review can be found here
Abstract
The antiviral agent remdesivir (Veklury®; Gilead Sciences), nucleotide analogue prodrug, has broad-spectrum activity against viruses from several families. Having demonstrated potent antiviral activity against coronaviruses in preclinical studies, remdesivir emerged as a candidate drug for the treatment of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, during the current global pandemic. Phase III evaluation of remdesivir in the treatment of COVID-19 commenced in early 2020 and has thus far yielded promising results. In late May 2020, Taiwan conditionally approved the use of remdesivir in patients with severe COVID-19. This was followed by a rapid succession of conditional approvals in various countries/regions including the EU and Canada. Preceding these conditional approvals, an emergency use authorization for remdesivir had been granted in the USA (on 1 May 2020) and a special approval for emergency use was granted in Japan (on 7 May 2020). This article summarizes the milestones in the development of remdesivir leading to its first conditional approval for the treatment of COVID-19.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
