Published March 13, 2021, 11:08 AM
Mexico on Friday approved the anti-viral drug remdesivir for emergency use treating COVID-19 patients in the Latin American country, one of the worst hit by the pandemic.
In this file photo taken on April 08, 2020, one vial of the drug Remdesivir lies during a press conference about the start of a study with the Ebola drug Remdesivir in particularly severely ill patients at the University Hospital Eppendorf (UKE) in Hamburg, northern Germany, amidst the new coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.
(Photo by Ulrich Perrey / POOL / AFP / MANILA BULLETIN)
Regulatory agency Cofepris said it had authorized the medicine for use exclusively by hospitals and specialist doctors during the early stages of the illness.
New combination therapy proven to be highly effective in HBV infection model
Around 260 million people, more than three percent of the global population, are chronically infected with the hepatitis B virus (HBV); in the long term, this often leads to complications such as liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. A cure is not yet possible with the available medication. Scientists at the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) and the University Hospital Eppendorf (UKE) have now investigated a new combination therapy that has proven highly effective in their infection model.
The new therapeutic approach is based on shutting down the viral hepatitis B genome located in the nucleus of infected liver cells. Upon infection of the liver cell, the viral genome is transformed inside the nucleus into a closed circular DNA molecule. This deoxyribonucleic acid is a stable molecule known as covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) and serves as the template for the production of new viruses.