Shares Of Gilead Sciences Surge After Clinical Trial Suggest That  Remdesivir Helped Covid-19 Patients Recover Quickly

Covid-19 patients who are getting Gilead Sciences Inc.’s experimental drug remdesivir have been staging a quick recovery, with most going home in days, STAT News reported on Thursday based on a video conversation about the clinical trial that outlet claimed having access to.

Shares of Gilead Sciences Inc jumped 12.7% in after-hours trading on Thursday following the publication of the Stat News report.

The patients taking part in a clinical trial of the drug have all had severe respiratory symptoms and fever, but were able to leave the hospital after less than a week of treatment,the STAT News report quoted a doctor leading the trial as saying.

"The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We've only had two patients perish," Dr. Kathleen Mullane, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Chicago who is leading the clinical trial, said in the video.

There are no proven treatments or vaccines for the novel coronavirus which has infected two million people world-wide and killed nearly 150,000 people, but remdesivir is widely regarded front-runner in the race to develop a treatment for COVID-19 infections that works.

Though the findings reported by Stat are promising, they are not based on full clinical trial data from the company.

The drug, made by Gilead Sciences, was tested against Ebola with little success, but multiple studies in animals showed the drug could both prevent and treat coronaviruses related to Covid-19, including SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).

In a statement Thursday, Gilead said: “What we can say at this stage is that we look forward to data from ongoing studies becoming available.”

Gilead had said to expect results for its trial involving severe cases in April. Gilead is conducting tests of the drug in 2,400 patients with severe Covid-19 symptoms in 152 trial sites around the world. It's also testing the drug in 1,600 patients with moderate symptoms at 169 hospitals and clinics around the world.

Striking a cautious note, the company said “ What we can say at this stage is that we look forward to data from ongoing studies becoming available.”

"We understand the urgent need for a COVID-19 treatment and the resulting interest in data on our investigational antiviral drug remdesivir," the company said in a statement to CNN. But it said a few stories about patients are just that -- stories.” the company added

"The totality of the data need to be analyzed in order to draw any conclusions from the trial. Anecdotal reports, while encouraging, do not provide the statistical power necessary to determine the safety and efficacy profile of remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19," the statement by Gilead said.

Gilead Sciences had announced last week that results from a cohort analysis of 53 patients hospitalized with severe complications of COVID-19 who were treated with its experimental antiviral remdesivir administered under a compassionate trial program.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved 53 severely ill patients across US, Canada and Europe who were given remdesivir as part of a “compassionate use” program.