ruxolitinib A drug used to treat the deadly childhood immune disease HLH (hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis) may help patients survive the cytokine storm in the worst COVID-19 cases:
Patients taking ruxolitinib were randomly selected to receive two daily 5mg oral doses of the anti-inflammatory drug, plus the standard of care treatment for COVID-19. A randomly selected control group of 21 patients received a placebo along with the standard of care treatment.
"Ruxolitinib recipients had a numerically faster clinical improvement," study authors write in their report. "Significant chest CT improvement, a faster recovery from lymphopenia and favorable side-effect profile in ruxolitinib group were encouraging and informative to future trials to test efficacy of ruxolitinib in a larger population."
Patients treated with ruxolitinib saw a shorter median time to clinical improvement compared to the control group. Researchers reported that 90 percent% of ruxolitinib patients showed CT scan improvement within 14 days, compared with 9 percent of patients from the control group.
Three patients in the control group eventually died of respiratory failure. All the severely ill patients who received ruxolitinib survived.
