A clinical trial studying the effectiveness of already-approved drugs against COVID-19 has opened a new arm to test the antiparasitic drug ivermectin.
The study started last year with the dosage already approved by the Federal Drug Administration, said Leslie Lenert, M.D., director of the Biomedical Informatics Center at the Medical University of South Carolina and the principal investigator for the MUSC study site.
Now, having met its enrollment goal for that dosage, the trial will begin studying a higher dosage while investigators crunch the numbers from the first round.
Called ACTIV-6, the trial is a nationwide study under the umbrella of the National Institutes of Health's Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) public-private partnership. ACTIV-6 is led by the Duke Clinical Research Institute, with MUSC serving as the study site in South Carolina through collaboration in the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network.
The trial has multiple "arms" so that it can investigate different drugs at the same time. It began with fluticasone furoate, a corticosteroid often used for asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that is delivered via inhaler; fluvoxamine, an antidepressant in pill form; and ivermectin at a dosage of 400 mcg/kg for three days.
The fluticasone furoate and the initial ivermectin arms are now closed. The new ivermectin arm will test the drug at 600 mcg/kg for six days.
All of the drugs are being tested in people who have mild to moderate COVID - in other words, people who have tested positive and are symptomatic but haven't had to be hospitalized.
So far, more than 3,000 people have volunteered for the study, with MUSC enrolling the third-highest number of people among the 87 participating sites across the nation.
