KARACHI: Scientists at Karachi’s Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS) have claimed to develop the first medicine for the treatment of coronavirus, saying ‘severe’ patients who had received the product had a 100 percent recovery rate.
According to Dow University, intravenous immunoglobulin (C-IVIG) therapy had entered the final stage of trials and will be rolled out soon.
The therapy uses immunoglobulin (IG), a blood product extracted from the plasma of people who have recovered from an infection, and which is rich in the antibodies that target the virus.
Talking to M.M News, Dr. Shaukat Ali, head of biotechnology at DUHS and lead on the C-IVIG project, said, “We have seen is that all severe patients who received C-IVIG treatment had 100 percent recovery ratio while in critical patients the recovery ratio was almost 65 percent.”
He further said that the DUHS team had observed that the treatment had significantly reduced the period of hospitalization. “Pakistan is the first country in the world that has accomplished the experiment and announced it. There are two clinical trials going on which were registered after us,” Ali said.
In response to a question, he said that all the infectious diseases in the world have vaccines to prevent it and when they get sick, the patient is treated with medicine.
“Vaccines to prevent COVID-19 are now available, but there is no medicine or therapy available to treat corona patients, because the results of the vaccine are never 100%. Therefore a medicine to cure such diseases is important” he added.
He announced that the drug will be manufactured locally after its registration with the International Drugs Association and Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP).
In Pakistan, clinical research started in June, after a series of regulatory approvals. The experiment was also registered with the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in the United States, which maintains the biggest global registry of clinical trials.
