Treatments for COVID-19: where are we now?

Clinicians and scientists in the UK are leading the fight against COVID-19 as an innovative platform has been launched by the University of Liverpool, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the Southampton Clinical Trials Unit. This news follows last month's news that the largest randomised controlled clinical trial for a COVID-19 treatment, funded by the UK's National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), led to the discovery of dexamethasone as the first drug to improve survival rates (NIHR, 2020).

The new drug-testing platform is called AGILE and was developed by infectious disease clinicians, clinical and preclinical pharmacologists, clinical trials specialists, as well as statisticians. Its mission is to test new drugs for COVID-19 from all over the world at an accelerated pace, identifying those compounds that can most effectively fight the virus with patient safety being the top priority, according to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) (McKee, 2020).