Study of Ruxolitinib Plus Simvastatin in the Prevention and Treatment of Respiratory Failure of COVID-19.
Status:
Recruiting
Trial end date:
2020-05-13
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
COVID-19's mechanism to enter the cell is initiated by its interaction with its cellular
receptor, the angiotensin-converting enzyme. As a result of this union, a clathrin-mediated
endocytosis process begins. This route is one of the therapeutic targets for which available
drugs are being investigated in order to treat COVID-19 infection. This is one of the
mechanisms blocked by drugs like ruxolitinib and chloroquine.
Various drugs approved for clinical use that block the clathrin-mediated endocytosis pathway
have been explored. It has been found that the best in vitro and in vivo results were
obtained with statins, which also allowed generating a greater potent adaptive immune
response.
Therefore, statins and specifically simvastatin make it possible to block the entry process
used by COVID-19, block inflammation by various mechanisms and increase the adaptive immune
response. All of these processes are desirable in patients infected with COVID-19.
Statins have been proposed to have beneficial effects in patients infected with MERS-COV,
another coronavirus similar to COVID-19, but there have been no randomized studies supporting
the use of statins in patients with COVID-19 infection.
In this project we propose the combined use of one of these drugs, ruxolitinib with
simvastatin, looking for a synergistic effect in the inhibition of viral entry and in the
anti-inflammatory effect.