CORAL GABLES, FLA. (WSVN) - South Florida is again on the front lines of the COVID-19 fight.
The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine is the first to test a new drug that could help stop the virus from settling in the lungs.
COVID-19 attacks the specific cell in the lung which is in charge of getting air into your body.
Which is why many patients with coronavirus have a hard time breathing.
In the most severe cases, the patient is put on a ventilator.
Many of those patients die.
But the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine is trying a new treatment with a drug called RLF-100.
Dr. Dushyantha Jayaweera of the Miller School of Medicine said, “It has an anti-inflammatory activity. It basically stops the swelling of different organs like the lung.”
The drug is currently used to treat lung ailments including sarcoidosis.
It has also been used by thousands of patients exposed to mold in their homes.
Jayaweera said, “It was suggested maybe it could work with acute respiratory syndrome with COVID.”
It is believed the drug will block COVID from attacking cells in the lungs.
Jayaweera said, “The current patient we are treating, he’s on a ventilator. it’s within 48 hours of going on the ventilator, we started the treatment.”
RLF-100 is currently being used only on patients already on a ventilator.
But the FDA has now approved expanding the study to patients in respiratory distress before a ventilator is needed.
Dr. Jonathan Javitt, the CEO of NeuroRx, said, “They will take it with a nebulizer. That’s a machine that lets you take a drug and turn it into cold steam and you inhale it. People with asthma know about nebulizers.”
U.M. doctors said this is a blind test, so some patients will get the drug and others will get a placebo.
Jayaweera said, “We will say we don’t know, we don’t know whether this drug will work or not. We’re going to test it, and whatever the results are, that’s what we get.”
If the results are good, the drugs could be expanded to hospitals nationwide and could be used at home to prevent hospitalization.
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