Guest of BFM, the director general of the Institut Pasteur de Lille, Xavier Nassif, gave news about the molecule on which the researchers are working. A label has just been awarded to the Foundation, to speed up medical research, because the laboratory results are rather encouraging.
Launch of a clinical trial on humans
This is good news in the search for a treatment for Covid-19. Since the start of the epidemic, the team of scientists from the Institut Pasteur de Lille has focused its efforts on the project ” Therapid. ” The latter has just obtained the label ” National research priority », Which will make it possible to obtain authorizations more quickly and thus speed up research. Indeed, as Xavier Nassif explains, “ to carry out clinical trials, it is necessary to have numerous authorizations, in particular from the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and the approval of an ethics committee. He specifies that to obtain these authorizations, the waiting period is two to three months. With the label, the health authorities will be able to give their approval within eight days. The goal is to design an effective drug against Covid-19 more quickly. The molecule can then be validated or modified. Depending on the decision rendered, therapeutic trials on humans will be able to begin. To do this, “ several hundred patients Will be recruited. Volunteers will be given a placebo or the medicine and will be monitored for three weeks. However, the Director General would like to point out that it is not because the molecule ” works very well in the laboratory that it will work in humans. “
A “particularly powerful” molecule
The Institut Pasteur de Lille has a database of molecules, a chemical library. The advantage of this access lies in the fact that the substances have already received marketing authorizations for other ailments. Also, the side effects are known. Thanks to that ” local expertise “, Scientists have identified a molecule that” inhibits the growth of coronavirus very well in vitro. This is clofoctol, also known as Octofen, a drug formerly used against nasopharyngitis. As announced by the Institut Pasteur de Lille, “ we should know if the drug works or not against Covid-19 in humans, during the summer. It is, in fact, essential to have a curative treatment against the disease, in addition to the vaccines, especially if the latter prove ineffective against the variants of Sars-Cov-2.