Flash finding: 28% of all COVID-19 drug trials involve chloroquine products
Let’s try something new.
A 46brooklyn report in 500 words or less.
You may be thinking … Impossible! We thought that as well, but it really happened. It wasn’t easy, It took tremendous restraint. Very much like trying to just watch one episode of Tiger King, rather than bingeing that entire mess at once. Absurd, right?
We’ll call these 46brooklyn-lite reports “Flash Findings.” Anytime you see this, know that our goal is to simply get you the facts, along with some very brief commentary, and get you back to re-watching the Here Kitty Kitty music video.
These reports, which are largely inspired by the brevity typically found in Axios, will be structured in three sections:
We’ll kick off each Flash Findings report with What we found. Just the facts and charts.
But it wouldn’t be very 46brooklyn to stop there, so we’ll then move onto What we found when we dug deeper, which is (unsurprisingly) what we found when we dug deeper.
We’ll conclude with FWIW (for what it’s worth), which are our thoughts on the matter, take em or leave em.
That said, let’s get started.
(by the way … if you are counting, the 500 words or less starts now.)
What we found
For the past few weeks, we have been tracking the number of COVID-19 trials on ClinicalTrials.gov (Download the latest file here or on our Abnormal Drug Price Increase Tracker), with specific emphasis on drug trials. As of Tuesday, the week-over-week number of trials increased by 252 to a total of 997, with the number of drug trials up 101 to a total of 431.
Source: ClinicalTrials.gov, Gold Standard Drug Database
As shown above, the number of different active ingredients undergoing trials for COVID-19 is now up to 190. These active ingredients are included in a whopping 1,472 products and 5,771 NDCs that are on the U.S. market today.
What we found (when we dug deeper)
190 is a lot of active ingredients. But we realized we haven’t yet investigated the concentration of the research community’s collective efforts into studying particular drugs. Ideally, it would nice if the research community is distributing their efforts in a somewhat organized fashion over the all these active ingredients being evaluated.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. As alluded to by CNBC two weeks ago, and as shown below, the chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine craze appears to have spilled over to the research community, launching 124 trials on these two drugs – a staggering 28% of the total drug trials, as of today. Contrast this with remdesivir, a drug that is starting to show some promise, which currently has 11 ongoing trials.
Source: ClinicalTrials.gov
Even more shocking is that the pace of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine trials launched doesn’t appear to have slowed over the past week, despite increasing evidence that it may not help all that much.
Source: ClinicalTrials.gov, White House Press Briefing, Guidelines, FDA EUA Remdesivir
FWIW
With such great need for better treatment options for COVID-19, it seems quite important that our nation’s collective research and drug evaluation efforts are as efficient and effective as possible.
So, we wonder whether it’s overly necessary to devote over a quarter of the scientific community’s time to one seriously hyped-up base molecule (quinoline, from which chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are derived). Would more organized management of the research process have refocused some of this effort on evaluation of other potential treatments that are not getting as much airtime from government officials and the media?
Running the risk of taking this even further, is this just a symptom of the, “I hope I get lots of likes/recognition for this post/work/research” human condition? We’re humans too, and therefore likely guilty of this too. Case in point – how many of you clicked on this report simply because we put “chloroquine” in the title? But there’s less (arguably) societal risks associated with this report. We’ve wasted a few minutes of your time at the very worst. There is clearly more risk with this in our research community.
It would seem that efforts to stem the tide of COVID-19 would be better served by a broader, holistic approach to assessing the efficacy of the wide range of available medications, rather than the seemingly excessive focus on this shiny, glittered up, attention-grabbing, quinoline-derived molecule, which looks like it may be fool’s gold.
Thanks to John Wilkerson at Inside Health Policy for highlighting our most recent generic drug pricing report that looked at the surprising dips in generic drug prices prior to the more prominent emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. We applaud John’s efforts to get further information from the generic manufacturers referenced in the report.