Covid-19: Sun Pharma gets DCGI nod for nafamostat clinical trial in patients
NEW DELHI: The Drug Controller General of India has approved Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd’s clinical trial with nafamostat mesilate in covid-19 patients.
Nafamostat is approved in Japan for improvement of acute symptoms of pancreatitis and treatment of disseminated intravascular coagulation, a condition in which abnormal clumps of blood clots form inside blood vessels.
A group of scientists from the University of Tokyo in Japan and Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Germany, however, have found that nafamostat, at very low concentrations, suppresses a protein that that the novel coronavirus uses to enter human lung cells, while another group from Institut Pasteur in South Korea found that the drug was able to inhibit virus entry at very low concentrations.
“Sun Pharma is constantly evaluating potential targets that can be explored for treating covid-19 patients. Nafamostat has shown promising data against SARS-CoV-2 virus in in vitro studies conducted by three independent groups of scientists in Europe, Japan and South Korea. We believe it holds promise in the treatment of COVID-19 patients," managing director Dilip Shanghvi was quoted as saying in the release.
29 May 2020
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