Jeff Aronson

Hi, yes, I'm Jeff Adamson.

I'm a physician working in Oxford, and my specialty is clinical pharmacology, which means I'm interested in, well, anything to do with medicines, really.

If they move, I shoot them.

I think to understand why a drug like this might be beneficial, you need to know something about how the virus works.

And there are two major

Dr. Michael Gomez- Aspects of that one is how the virus gets into your cells in the first place.

And the second is once they're in your cells.

How does it reproduce Dr. Michael Gomez- And overwhelm your body.

So for me, those are the two major points that would offer targets for drug therapy.

And the drug you want me to talk about today called remdesivir attacks the second of those.

It potentially stops the virus reproducing in the cells.

We only have one report now of its use in humans.

And it's a study that's been published, which was just a look-see to give it to 60 or so patients to see if they got better in any way.

And one can't really interpret the data from such a study.

So what we are waiting for now is the results of proper trials of this medicine in humans.

Harms are often neglected in clinical trials because people are so interested in benefits.

But it is important to collect harms.

What we know...

is from the use of this drug remdesivir in a previous viral infection with Ebola virus.

And in that case, the incidence of adverse events, that's just bad things happening, which may or may not be due to the drug, of course,