Hospitals in New York are giving Covid-19 patients heartburn medicine to see if it helps fight the virus, according to Dr. Kevin Tracey, president of Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health, initiated the trial.
Preliminary results of the clinical trial of famotidine, the active ingredient in Pepcid, could come out in the next few weeks, said Dr. Kevin Tracey.
Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health runs 23 hospitals in the New York City area.
So far, 187 patients have enrolled in the clinical trial, and Northwell eventually hopes to enroll 1,200, he said.
“There are many examples in the history of medicine where a drug that was designed for one purpose turns out to have an effect in another disease,” Tracey said.
“It’s generic, it’s plentiful and it’s inexpensive,” he said.
But he emphasized that it might not work.
“We don’t know if it has any benefit. We really don’t. I swear we don’t,” he said. “People are hoping for anything. But we need to do this clinical trial.”
He also emphasized that the patients in the study are in the hospital taking mega-doses intravenously — doses about nine times what someone would normally take for heartburn.
“You should not go to the drugstore and take a bunch of heartburn medicine,” he said.
Patients in the study are being given the heartburn drug intravenously along with hydroxychloroquine at Northwell’s North Shore University Hospital, Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Lenox Hill Hospital, said David Battinelli, vice president and chief medical officer of Northwell.
The researchers initially wanted to test famotidine on its own, but with so many patients now being treated with hydroxychloroquine, they wouldn’t have had enough test subjects, they told Science Magazine, which first reported the study.
Those taking the combination will be compared with a group taking only the anti-malarial and a control group.
Hydroxychloroquine has been touted as a promising treatment by President Trump and some doctors and patients, though the preliminary results of some local studies found no benefit.
Anecdotally, the heartburn drug shows promise, said Battinelli, adding that he hopes to recruit up to 1,250 patients for the trial.
The hope is that famotidine will act as a decoy for the virus, so that while the virus is preoccupied with famotidine, it is unable to reproduce itself and spread throughout the body.
Dr. Stuart Ray, professor of medicine in infectious diseases and vice chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics at Johns Hopkins, said he was surprised to hear that researchers at Northwell are studying famotidine in people with COVID-19, and that he is skeptical about preliminary data from China because it has not been vetted in the typical review process.
However, he said he is glad there is some scientific rationale behind the drug. He adds that despite the megadoses, the drug is likely to be safe.
