Over 2,000 clinical trials currently underway for COVID-19 therapies, finds study

According to a new report, there are now over 2,000 clinical trials testing potential COVID-19 therapies globally – 398 of these clinical trials are for chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine and 22 of these trials are for remdesivir. There are also over 583 companies and institutions driving prophylactic and curative innovation.

The findings, from Globaldata, reveal that there are also currently over 718 pipeline drugs associated with COVID-19. 

Johanna Swanson, Product Manager at GlobalData, commented: “These drugs include combinations of novel agents and repurposed drugs and new ones are added daily as new studies are announced or completed at a rapid rate.”

Additionally, report says that there are 164 strategic partnerships, 46 licensing agreements and 26 financing deal-making activities involved in the development of COVID-19 therapeutics. This activity demonstrates the constantly changing strategic landscape of the pharmaceutical coronavirus response, says the report. Research published on COVID-19 shows the same rapid pace, with a doubling every two weeks of the number of papers published.

Swanson added: “The issues surrounding this large amount of information can be overcome with dashboards that show trends over time and the latest updates for specific COVID-19 data. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) has high promise to mine this data and to pull out relevant information. Natural language processing can be used to analyse all these scientific papers on COVID-19 and extract relevant information. These can use machine learning to filter on what the researcher is interested in.”