Clinical trials for treatment or prevention of COVID-19. A review of Clinicaltrials.gov.

Abstract

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly progressed into the worst pandemic in recent years. There are currently no approved therapies to treat the disease. Several clinical trials are being conducted to evaluate therapeutic approaches. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional descriptive study to examine the main characteristics of COVID-19-related clinical interventional trials registered with ClinicalTrials.gov from January to March 27th, 2020. . Results: We included 519 trials, 57.6% were phase II or III, open-label and randomized trials. Disease treatment was evaluated in 75.5% of trials, while prevention was evaluated in 12.1%. A total of 243 trials were listed as recruiting, and 42.4% were not yet recruiting. Approximately 20% of the analyzed trials are investigating antimalarial agents, while 10.2% are studying the use of convalescent plasma to treat the disease. Antiretrovirals, monoclonal antibodies, the use of stem cells, nitric oxide gases and vaccines are the most commonly evaluated therapies. As of the publication of this review, none of the clinical trials had uploaded results. Conclusions: ClinicalTrials.gov is an important database that contains ongoing research trials on COVID-19This study quantifies the outcomes of COVID-19-related clinical trials. More than 500 studies have been analyzed finding that most of these studies are interventional clinical trials Phase II or III evaluating drugs or biological agents for the prevention or treating COVID-19.