Can Cancer Drug Help Control Severe COVID-19? Yale Doctors Believe So

Can cancer medicine save patients from the impacts of severe COVID-19? Doctors from Yale think so after they gave the medication called "tocilizumab," to seriously sick patients in March.

US News reported that the said drug "has a long history" of reducing the life-threatening immune system reactions frequently experienced by cancer patients as they undergo treatment.

And, since the similar kind of hazardous response progresses in numerous cases of the virus, researchers believed "tocilizumab" might be useful for patients considered to have the illness. 

The research finding, even though it is only initial, seems to be dramatically lower in mortality rates among sick patients reportedly, needing to go on ventilators.

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How low is the mortality rate?

Among the first batch of COVID-19-stricken individuals, 239 in all, who underwent treatment at Yale-New Haven Hospital, during the first few weeks of the pandemic, 153 took the "tocilizumab." The said number which included "48 patients who had been placed on ventilators," reports said.

Additionally, of all the severely sick patients who eventually survived the "killer virus," the drug seems to have considerably reduced the total time that a patient needs to be placed on ventilation.

And, while hospitals across the nation needed to keep their patients "hooked up from 12 to 14 days," reports said, ventilation of patients at Yale usually took up to only five days.

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Tociluzumab to combat COVID-19?

The medicine was first devised to combat the dangers of a deadly immune system phenomenon, also called "cytokine release syndrome" or CRS. CRS is an unmanageable inflammatory reaction that activates in certain patients.

CSR is when the response of the body in combating the virus goes so unhindered and results in becoming dangerous, impairing the lungs, the liver, and the kidney.

The medical expert elaborated too that one needs an immune response, and it cannot be completely shut down. Nevertheless, one cannot let that immune response become uncontrollable, which is what can occur in cancer patients who go through treatment.

For COVID-19 patients, on the other hand, Price emphasized, there were no medications for the deadly virus in March, approved by the Food and Drugs Administration.

Pioneering Immunotherapy in Cancer

Price explained too that certainly, each time there is an attempt to try a new treatment, "You want to do it in a manageable clinical trial setting." More so, there clearly is a need to be very cautious. 

The reality, though, was that they, in the medical field, were foreseeing that this global health crisis is about to strike, and they just needed "to wade through the data-free zone" to discover what to do next. 

Following considerable success among those very ill patients of COVID-19, Price, together with her team, decided to augment their protocol for tocilizumab, giving the medicine to less sick patients, to stop CRS overall.

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