New York's Northwell Health testing potential heartburn treatment for COVID-19

Last Updated: 2020-04-28

By Reuters Staff

(Reuters) - When Dr. Kevin Tracey of Northwell Health's Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research got a call from a colleague who had been in Wuhan, China, seeing patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in January, his curiosity was piqued.

Tracey said Dr. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital told him Chinese physicians had observed patients with COVID seeming to have "better outcomes if they took famotidine as part of the normal treatment of their gastroesophageal reflux, or heartburn."

The heartburn drug famotidine, found in Pepcid AC, seemed an unlikely remedy to help in the fight against COVID-19, but now Tracey is leading a clinical trial that administers the medication intravenously to patients who have the virus.

Researchers at Alchem Laboratories screened famotidine and found the drug could possibly block the enzyme, or protease, that the virus needs to replicate, Tracey said.

Tracey is proceeding with caution but has enrolled 200 patients in the trial, which should have at least a cohort of 300 before researchers begin to study the data.

"The whole responsibility one has to accept in doing this kind of research, asking these kinds of questions, is first, do no harm. And second, use a clinical trial strategy and design that provides valuable data, not anecdotes, not stories," he said.

Doctors in China found by looking at more than 6,000 patient records, that patients on famotidine died at a rate of about 14%, versus the 27% who died who weren't on the heartburn medication, but Tracey stressed that "the data from China was retrospective, it was historic, looking at records and patient interviews. The only way to know if famotidine would be effective would be to give it to patients in a blinded randomized clinical trial, which is what we're doing now at Northwell in New York."

He said there was precedent and hope for using a common drug to fight disease.

"If you think of HIV, there is no HIV vaccine, but HIV can be quite effectively treated using drugs that target the HIV protease," Tracey said. "And so, if one wishes to hope and we all hope for the best, we can hope that a widely used, relatively safe drug, by accident, is a protease inhibitor for this virus. And then that could be very important. That could change the course of the disease."

Tracey said his team will know the outcome of the study in "weeks to months."