NIH launches effort to ID promising COVID-19 treatments for clinical trials

The National Institutes of Health Oct. 13 announced a study designed to identify promising COVID-19 therapies and investigational drugs that merit larger clinical trials.

The ACTIV-5 Big Effect Trial, which will enroll adult volunteers hospitalized with COVID-19 at as many as 40 U.S sites, will be administered by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in collaboration with NIH’s public-private Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Innovations and Vaccines partnership.

NIH said the phase 2 adaptive, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial will compare different investigational therapies to a common control arm to determine which experimental treatments have relatively large effects, with approximately 100 hospitalized volunteers assigned to each study arm.