The drug Remdesivir has started to be used to treat #COVID19 and the first data were just published. So, does it work? The answer is that we don’t know yet. It looks like it might be promising, but there’s no way to know until we have “controls.”

So, what did the study look at? This study was of 53 patients, most of whom were on ventilators, so having an advanced infection. The authors observed improvement for 68% of patients and 13% died. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007016?query=featured_coronavirus

Is that an improvement? Maybe. The challenge is that there are no controls in this study. The researchers compared their data to other populations of patients, and point out that it looks promising, but there could be many reasons for this.

Controls are the heart of scientific research. In any research, there are many things (sometimes called “parameters”) that can impact the results.

In this case, it could be age, sex, or health of the patients. Or, it could be the level of care that they receive in their local hospital. Or, it could be how far advanced the infection was when they started treatment.

The key to scientific research is that if you want to show that something is causing an effect, you need a “control” where everything except the thing you’re testing remains the same. In this case, that’s a similar patient population receiving similar treatment except the drug.

When the need for therapeutic options is as great as it is now, seeing early data can be interesting and encouraging. But, it’s important to know the limitations of what can be concluded and what it will take to know if it’s really working. We’ll have to stay tuned!