A phase II clinical trial has found that a combination of three drugs — interferon beta-1b, lopinavir-ritonavir, and ribavirin — plus standard care is successful in treating mild-to-moderate cases of COVID-19.
This three-drug combination also shortens the duration of viral shedding — that is, the period during which the virus is detectable in a person’s body and transmissible to others.
The results of the new multicenter, prospective, open-label, randomized trial now appear in the journal The Lancet. The researchers recruited 127 participants between February 10 and March 20, 2020.
These participants came from six hospitals in Hong Kong, China, where doctors had tested them for SARS-CoV-2 and obtained positive results.