COVID-19 Clinical Trials and Expanded Access

Coronavirus disease 2019 has forced worldwide the implementation of unprecedented restrictions to control its rapid spread and mitigate its impact. The Spanish government has enforced social distancing, quarantine and home confinement. This restriction of daily life activities and separation from loved ones may lead to social isolation and loneliness with health-related consequences in community-dwelling older adults with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia and their caregivers. Additionally, an inadequate access to healthcare and social support services may aggravate chronic conditions. Technology home-based interventions emerge for combating social isolation and loneliness preventing the risk of viral exposure. The aim of this multicentre cohort study is to explore, analyze and determine the impact of social isolation on: 1) cognition, quality of life, mood, technophilia and perceived stress of community-dwelling older adults with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia, and on caregiver burden; 2) health and social care services access and utilization, and 3) cognitive, social and entertainment use of ICTs. This study will be conducted in two Spanish regions Andalucía (Málaga) and Cataluña (Tarrasa). In total 200 dyads, consisting of a person with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia (PMCI/MD) and their informal caregiver will be contacted by telephone. Potential respondents will be participants of the SMART 4 MD (N=100) and TV-AssistDem (N=100) clinical trials. The change in means in the variables will be analyzed comparing baseline results in the previous studies with those during and after confinement using the ANOVA test of repeated measures or the non-parametric Friedman test if appropriate. The performance of a multivariate analysis of variance (ANCOVA) to introduce possible covariates will also be contemplated. A 95% confidence level will be used.

The current study aims to assess the feasibility, acceptance and clinical outcomes of a practical high-dose aiTBS protocol, including tapering treatments and symptom-based relapse prevention treatments, in patients with unipolar depression previously responsive to ECT and patients needing urgent treatment due to symptom severity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

France has been put on a lockdown for 8 weeks to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus between 17/03/2020 and 11/05/2020. During this lockdown, which is likely to have psychopathological repercussions on the population, the public authorities and the media informed the population about the number of deaths occurring each day. While the functioning of autobiographical memory following traumatic events remains a debate in the literature, the impact of the daily announcement of mass deaths on the memory system in the general population and the relationship between long-term memory and delusional thinking in certain psychopathologies have yet to be explored in the literature. The investigators wish to demonstrate that self-reported recall of recorded deaths may represent this distortion of perception, symptomatic of these pathologies by an on-line questionnaire.

Observational, cross-sectional, multi-center, multi-wave survey, assessing characteristics and predictors of physical and mental health as well as health behaviors during COVID-19 pandemic, targeting the general population (children, adolescents and adults).

The objectives of this study are to characterise immune responses in people with CoV-SARS-2 infection and use this knowledge to advance vaccine design, treatment options, and diagnostic reagents. Eligible participants will include people diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infection, and may include recently returned travellers and non-travellers in the community presenting to tertiary hospital healthcare facilities. Recruitment will be opportunistic, and sampling intensity may vary depending on the phase of the outbreak. Participants can be enrolled at any timepoint (up to 6 months) following diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19). Blood samples and clinical data will be collected.

The effective medical treatment against COVID-19 infection is still unknown. Chloroquine phosphate is a well-known antimalarial drug which has been on the market for many years. Recently, in vitro study shown that Chloroquine is effective at both entry and at post-entry stages of the COVID-19 infection of Vero E6 cells with promising results. Chloroquine is also an immune-modifier and could distribute to the whole body including lung. Also, chloroquine is cheap and safe, and could be a promising agent against COVID-19 infection. However, only hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) with the extra hydroxyl group is available in Taiwan. Therefore, hydroxychloroquine instead become the best choice for the treatment candidate, since it shows higher in vitro potency (EC50) against COVID-19 with lower toxicity while retaining the original effect which compared with chloroquine.

It has been suggested that ibuprofen might be associated with more severe cases of coronavirus infections, based on the observation that severe COVID cases had been exposed to ibuprofen, resulting in a warning by the French authorities. This was attributed to: 1. a suggestion that ibuprofen might upregulate ACE-2 thereby increasing the entrance of COVID-19 into the cells, 2. an analogy with bacterial soft-tissue infections where more severe infections on NSAIDs are attributed to an immune-depressive action of NSAIDs, or to belated treatment because of initial symptom suppression, 3. fever is a natural response to viral infection, and reduces virus activity: antipyretic activity might reduce natural defenses against viruses. However fever reduction in critically ill patients had no effect on survival. However, these assertions are unclear: upregulation of ACEII would increase the risk of infection, not necessarily its severity, and would only apply to the use of NSAIDs before the infection, i.e. chronic exposure. It would be irrelevant to the infection once the patients are infected, i.e., to symptomatic treatment of COVID-19 infection. Anti-inflammatory effect masking the early symptoms of bacterial infections resulting in later antibiotic or other treatment is not applicable: there is no treatment of the virus that might be affected by masking symptoms. Antipyretic effect increasing the risk or the severity of infection would apply equally to all antipyretic agents including paracetamol, which share the same mechanism of action for fever reduction. EMA remains prudent about this assertion In addition, excess reliance on paracetamol while discouraging the use of ibuprofen might increase the risk of hepatic injury from paracetamol overdose. Paracetamol is the prime drug associated with liver injury and transplantation, in voluntary and inadvertent overdose or even at normal doses. This might be increased by COVID-related liver function alterations. It is therefore proposed to conduct a case-control study in a cohort of patients admitted to hospital in France with COVID-19 infection.

SNG001 is an inhaled drug that contains a antiviral protein called interferon beta (IFN-β). IFN-β in produced in the lungs during viral lung infections. It has been shown that older people and people with some chronic diseases have an IFN-β deficiency. Many viruses inhibit IFN-β as part of their strategy to evade the immune system. Addition of IFN-β in vitro protects lung cells from viral infection. IFN-β protects cells against the MERS and SARS coronaviruses (close relatives of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19). SNG001 is an inhaled formulation of interferon beta-1a it is currently in Phase II clinical trials for COPD patients. Synairgen has conducted randomised placebo controlled clinical trials of SNG001 involving >200 asthma and COPD patients. These trials have shown that SNG001 has: - been well tolerated during virus infections - enhanced antiviral activity in the lungs (measured in sputum and blood samples) - provided significant lung function benefit over placebo in asthma in two Phase II trials. Synairgen believes SNG001 could help prevent worsening or accelerate recovery of severe lower respiratory tract illness in COVID-19 patients. Patients who are in hospital or non-hospitalised but are a high risk groups (e.g. elderly or diabetics) will be invited to take part in the trial. The patient would receive either SNG001 or placebo once daily for 14 days. The severity of the patients condition would be recorded on a scale developed by the World Health Organisation and the patient would be asked questions about their breathlessness, cough and sputum every day, as well as assess their general medical condition and safety. The study will start as a Pilot phase where 100 patients will be randomised in the hospital setting and a 120 patients randomised in the home setting. Once each of the Pilot phases are complete, a Pivotal phase will be conducted. It is estimated that the size of each of the Pivotal phases (hospital and home) will be around 100 to 300 patients per arm. The actual number will be determined after the data review at the end of each of the Pilot phases. If SNG001 proves to be beneficial it would be a major breakthrough for the treatment of COVID-19.

Pilot study of tolerability and efficacy of transfusion of 200mL of convalescent plasma in patients with COVID-19 respiratory disease.

The purpose of this study is to identify healthcare workers with SARS CoV 2 antibodies who have not been previously diagnosed and are presumed COVID-19 negative, then determine the level of immunity in this population which could inform further decisions about widespread antibody testing in a healthcare worker population.