Posted on 03/17/2020 8:08:29 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
COVID-19 is rapidly spreading across the globe and the U.S.
The first of six Remdesivir trials could finish as soon as April.
Gilead's Remdesivir is very promising according to experts and scuttlebut.
This article lists the primary 12 reasons I think Remdesivir remains frontrunner to combat COVID-19.
One subscriber to The Special Situation Report asked about how much upside I think there is for Gilead (GILD) if Remdesivir is successful. In good news, Wells Fargo now thinks Remdesivir can add $20 to the stock over time.
My approach so far has been that this is not the question I want to try and quantify. I'm operating from the premise that we know Gilead was worth about $60-$65 before anyone was thinking about Remdesivir.
Remdesivir is going to add value if: 1) It's actually effective which has not yet been conclusively determined, 2) if it sells for a fair price 3) there's a sizeable number of patients to treat.
In my opinion, 2 and 3 are likely to work themselves out. Both are worth watching, but if you work with ranges in both inputs you'll get just modeling results that are light years apart because you are dealing with a "market" that's growing in exponential fashion.
The key way to make money by speculating on COVID-19 treatment is to do the scuttlebutt and figure out how likely it is that a treatment is effective before the official trial results are out. I'm doing that work on remdesivir and I am betting that remdesivir is effective.
Here's why: (Updated list from 17 reasons Why I'm confident Remdesivir will work against COVID-19):
(Excerpt) Read more at seekingalpha.com ...
I keep seeing posts pop up here about Israel but even their scientists say a vaccine would be six months away
and then it woud still have to get approved here, no?
This thread is about Gilead’s Remdesivir.
Remdesivir is NOT a vaccine, it is a novel antiviral drug in the class of nucleotide analogs. It is designed to TREAT the Coronavirus, not to vaccinate against it.
It was developed by Gilead Sciences and as a treatment for Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus infections, though it has subsequently also been found to show antiviral activity against other single stranded RNA viruses such as respiratory syncytial virus, Junin virus, Lassa fever virus, Nipah virus, Hendra virus, and the coronaviruses (including MERS and SARS viruses), and now, being tested for Covid-19.
I just read a write-up that said that an inexpensive anti-malarial drug is being used already and has been shown to be effective as both a treat and as a preventative. It has been used for a long time and has no adverse effects. If true, it would impact the market for new drugs.
BTW, Here’s the good news:
Remdesivir already has proven effective in lab tests against a range of coronaviruses like SARS, MERS and single-strand RNA viruses like Nipah virus.
Remdesivir has been proven to work against every coronavirus tested against whether in lab or animals. There is NO tests that showed no positive results.
There are also anecdotal evidence.
A U.S. man (the Washington case) and a French COVID-19 patient both recovered after being administered Remdesivir on a compassionate use basis. The French article wasn’t easy to find but it said the following (translated with Google translate):
The 48-year-old patient infected with the new coronavirus and released from the Bordeaux University Hospital on Thursday, after 22 days of hospitalization, was treated with remdesivir, a “promising” antiviral, said his medical team on Friday.”
It’s a promising sign that this patient was treated after 22 days. One question with therapies like this is how effective they are once you already are sick, and this is promising.
Of course,We should not derive conclusions from a handful of patients but it’s one more piece of the puzzle that helps raise the confidence level this drug works.
The only question is this — WHAT ARE THE SAFETY AND SIDE EFFECTS? This, we do not yet know.
As per Raymond James analyst:
A generic drug used to treat malaria may be as promising as any that companies are currently scrambling for to treat COVID-19, the coronavirus-related disease spreading rapidly,
That drug would be Chloroquine. I really hope the generic anti-malaria treatment, that's widely available, is effective. By my estimate, we need all the treatments we can get at least during the initial waves of this pandemic. Perhaps in later years we'll settle for a single best one although in practice you often see there are multiple competing treatments with their idiosyncratic pros and cons for various diseases.
But the setup of the French trial has me fearing for the viability of Chloroquine as it was not included in their 800-person trial:
Chloroquine, a drug against malaria, was not selected because of drug interactions and problems of side effects, especially in intensive care patients. "But if in vivo we show that there is an efficiency, this is something that we could add," notes Professor Yazdan Yazdanpanah.
Firearms manufacturers are doing a brisk business.
It wasn’t included because it’s off patent and the drug companies can’t make any money off of it.
Anybody hear anymore on the Chloroquin drugs? (S)
Some guy was talking on Ingraham last night about it.
Chloroquin?
Can you post the Cliff notes version? Thanks.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0
Again it looks like this is a viable alternative - cheaper and readily available.
Rather crass.
What’s it all about, Alphie?
“Remdesivir already has proven effective in lab tests against a range of coronaviruses like SARS, MERS and single-strand RNA viruses like Nipah virus.”
Being effective means something.
What studies have shown it to be effective (I’m not saying it hadn’t been - am asking what study showed it was).
Lab tests mean nothing.
“and has no adverse effects”
sigh. just the usual FR ignoramuses weighing in with their usual ignorance ...
the drug is Chloroquine and it has YUGE side-effects:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Chloroquine+side-effects
See POST#5 above.
Thanks.
All those tests are pre-clinical which means it can’t be called effective.
It has to be shown statistically significantly in well controlled clinical trials to be called effective.
You will not find the company developing it calling it effective.
Promising etc... Yes.
I bought some ALT. altimune. Just bought a little as a speculation. It’s around $3. It had some Corona virus vaccine news a few weeks ago.
I didn’t do any due diligence... None.
Giliad’s drug is promising, but also showing significant side effects, although nobody is saying if they are long-term.
But they could fall like a rock, because whoever finds a solution first is going to win the whole pot, unless they can’t manufacture.
Because who is going to wait another 3 months for Giliad to complete trials, if we find out that Regeneron is approved for public use and is 10% more effective? Or if HIV drugs work, and the government is paying, or forces the manufacturers to sell at production costs for the next 6 months?
Or if the Malaria drug turns out to fix 80% of the serious/critical cases, and it is generic and only costs 5 cents a pill to manufacture and people already have them in their closets and we could make a billion of them if we wanted?
And in 14 months, we have a vaccine, and THAT will be where everybody pours their money, and after that, cv will be history, unless it mutates and then we have to go through the whole virus treatment testing on the new mutation.
On the other hand —
I will assme that, once we have a massive supply of a treatment that is 90% effective on serious/critical cases, and reduces ventilator use by 80%, and hospital stays to 4 days or less in most cases, we will stop ALL attempts at control, and will just treat the 10% of the infected population that needs actual treatment. Let everybody get herd immunity. In that case, whoever has that drug will make a killing.
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