Selection criteria for therapeutics should still include efficacy against new virus variants, expert group says
The European Commission has published expert guidance on the development of Covid-19 treatments to improve the flow of medical care for patients.
The Covid-19 Therapeutics Innovation Booster, published on 23 May, was written by a group of experts on Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes the disease.
It recommends that Covid-19 treatments be developed based on their efficacy against new Sars-Cov-2 variants, after the evolution of previous variants drove successive waves of the pandemic.
Some treatments should be “expected to be relevant” for variants of concern with “clear evidence available indicating a significant impact on transmissibility, severity and/or immunity that is likely to have an impact on the epidemiological situation in the EU/EEA,” the guidance said.
The guidance was released ahead of the results of a call to design an interactive mapping platform for promising therapeutics.
The guidance also recommended considering factors such as whether a treatment is yet available for a condition, and suitability for a particular healthcare setting.
“There are many preclinical and clinical research studies being conducted around the world, in search of effective Covid-19 medicinal products for prevention and treatments of different stages of the disease,” the report said. “However, there is a gap between potential targets/new drug discovery and translation into clinical use.”
EU R&I commission Mariya Gabriel said the guidance “supports our continuous search for new therapies by scanning the research landscape and decreasing the gap between early-stage research and clinical use”.