I have 0 clues about clinical trials and the procedures. My questions is: Why are so few studies done on this?
I think so far we have 2 studies. (from China and France).
However, we've had hundreds of hospitals around the world with thousands of patients. And the drug is cheaply available.
What is preventing us to have studies around this in tens of different hospitals? Wouldn't WHO be able to budget this, or actually send people to conduct these studies all across the globe and report back day to day, so within 2 weeks we get a pretty significant set of data?
This drug has actually been mentioned in several past clinical studies on the closely-related SARS. The particular study below has been circulating in several areas online, and has citations to several more:
Despite the role of the pH-sensitive endosomal protease cathepsin L in the entry pathway (151, 300), viral culture does not require pretreatment with trypsin. However, this pH-sensitive cathepsin L may be a target for agents such as chloroquine, which elevates endosomal pH (174, 341).
The chemical pathway that allows the virus to enter the cell changes based on the pH of the cell. Chloroquine changes the pH of that pathway and therefore may slow/stop the entry of the virus into the cell.
I guess it could be time shortage? You need to bring researchers and doctors together, doctors need to increase documentation on treatment at a time where they are already over capacity, studies need to be approved by regulators and ethic boards etc. The system is not designed to start massive amounts of studies within a week and I'm not sure how much of the red tape can be cut without endangering lives.
I think so far we have 2 studies. (from China and France).
However, we've had hundreds of hospitals around the world with thousands of patients. And the drug is cheaply available.
What is preventing us to have studies around this in tens of different hospitals? Wouldn't WHO be able to budget this, or actually send people to conduct these studies all across the globe and report back day to day, so within 2 weeks we get a pretty significant set of data?