General news of Sunday 28 February 2021
Source: GNA
2021-02-28
Pyramax is also being tried in South Africa, Kenya and Burkina Faso to select the effectiveness data of Africa
The World Health Organization, which is pre-qualified, and the Ghana Food and Drugs Authority registered Antimalaria Pyramax (Artesunate-Pyronaridine), a combination drug for fixed doses for the treatment of malaria, has been approved for clinical trials for Covid-19 in South Korea .
Efforts are also being made in South Africa, Kenya and Burkina Faso to select data on efficiency in Africa.
The study, led by the Liverpool School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has the primary goal of comparing and evaluating the efficacy and safety of Pyramax in the treatment of patients infected with the coronavirus, especially mild to moderate covid- 19 infection and viral clearance (negative) nasal swab) on day 7.
Despite various drug development efforts, only vaccines led by AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and more recently Sputnik V have been approved for the management of COVID-19.
Efforts to treat COVID-19 are still ongoing. Nevertheless, several drug molecules, including drugs already approved for other diseases, are providing benefits for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.
Between October 2020 to date, Sars-CoV-2 manifests in three different variants of the original virus for which some vaccines have been manufactured.
These mutations include the B.1.1351 (501Y.V2) from South Africa, 501Y.V3 in Brazil and B.1.1.7 (501Y.V1) from the United Kingdom.
Due to the higher transmissible nature of the N501Y mutation known to all these variants of South Africa, Brazil and the United Kingdom, the predicted impact of vaccines needs to be reviewed as highly transmissible variants lead to exponential growth in the number infections.
This calls for consideration of alternative drug development pathways, apart from vaccines.
Some drug molecules such as Pyronaridine, which was synthesized at the Institute of Chinese Parasitic Disease in 1970, have been used in China for the treatment of malaria for more than 30 years.
Pyronaridine has been approved as an orphan drug for the treatment of Ebola in different parts of the world and shows promise in the fight against COVID-19 due to its antiviral properties.
In vitro studies comparing pyronaridine, artesunate and hydroxychloroquine with SARS-COV-2 show that pyronaridine artesunate is more potent than hydroxychloroquine in human lung epithelial cells.
Artesunate, on the other hand, has similar antiviral properties and offers anti-inflammatory effects that indicate its potential utility in the treatment of COVID-19. The estimated study period is 30 September 2021.
In 2017, Pyramax, an oral remedy, was developed as a result of a collaboration between Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), University of Iowa and Shin Poong Pharm, a South Korean pharmaceutical firm specializing in neglected tropical diseases, in both the pediatric and adult Essential Medicine Lists of the WHO for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria.
To improve accessibility in low- and middle-income countries, the Global Fund has also included Pyramax in its list of medicines.
Internationally, Pyramax is registered in twenty-six countries with a high malaria burden and since March 2020 has been registered locally by the Ghana Food and Drugs Authority for the management of uncomplicated malaria.