A new report on a promising potential coronavirus treatment produced by Gilead Sciences have sent stocks surging — Dow Jones Industrial Average futures jumping 789 points, S&P 500 futures rising 2.9%, and Nasdaq 100 futures climbing 2%.
“The premarket moves put the S&P 500 on track for its first back-to-back weekly gains since early February,” CNBC reports. “Through Thursday’s close, the S&P 500 has risen 0.35%, while the Nasdaq Composite climbed 4.65%, lifted by double-digit gains in Amazon and Netflix. The 30-stock Dow was down about 0.7% this week through Thursday, dragged down by JPMorgan as interest rates tumbled.”
Shares for Gilead, which is coordinating the clinical trials, surged by more than 13% after a report by STAT detailed the extremely promising results out of a Chicago hospital that is part of a larger clinical study on the effectiveness of the new potential treatment.
Analysts are pointing to the report as the key factor positively impacting the market. “An effective treatment is a huge deal and would create a path to open the economy and resume normal ‘social activities’ way sooner than a vaccine,” said Fundstrat Global Advisors researcher Tom Lee, as reported by CNBC. “A treatment is safer and more scalable because it is only given to people who need to be treated.”
On Thursday, STAT detailed the early clinical trial results of Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine Remdesivir in a test involving 125 people at a Chicago hospital. Nearly all of the patients who were treated with the antiviral drug experienced “rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms” and were “discharged in less than a week.” STAT reports:
Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.
The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir.
The infectious disease specialist heading up the Chicago study, the University of Chicago’s Kathleen Mullane, said that only two of the 125 severely ill patients died, while most of them have already been discharged. Mullane underscored that the study is not extensive enough to yet draw conclusions and does not include a placebo group, but said that when they start to use the drug, fever curves tend to fall rapidly.
“Fever is now not a requirement for people to go on trial, we do see when patients do come in with high fevers, they do [reduce] quite quickly,” said Mullane. “We have seen people come off ventilators a day after starting therapy. So, in that realm, overall our patients have done very well… Most of our patients are severe and most of them are leaving at six days, so that tells us duration of therapy doesn’t have to be 10 days. We have very few that went out to 10 days, maybe three.”
Along with hydroxylchloroquine, remdesivir is one of the drugs President Trump has pointed to as a potential treatment for COVID-19. The drug, Trump said last month, “seems to have a very good result.”
The Chicago clinical trial is one of many that are being run concurrently by other institutions. “Gilead’s severe Covid-19 study includes 2,400 participants from 152 different clinical trial sites all over the world,” STAT explains. “Its moderate Covid-19 study includes 1,600 patients in 169 different centers, also all over the world. The trial is investigating five- and 10-day treatment courses of remdesivir.”
While no other data has yet been released, and the Chicago results are not nearly enough to be conclusive, “excitement is high” about the treatment’s potential, the outlet notes.
As CNBC highlights, the after plummeting from records highs in February, stocks have rallied since March 23 as cases of coronavirus globally began to plateau. “Since late March, the S&P 500 has jumped more than 25% while the Dow has gained 26.6% in that time,” the outlet notes.
While the stock market is bouncing back, some 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment amid widespread “stay-at-home” orders.
This report has been expanded to include more information about the Chicago study.