During an extraordinary virtual meeting held on 2 April 2020, EMA’s human medicines committee (CHMP) gave recommendations on how the investigational antiviral medicine remdesivir should be used for treating coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in compassionate use programmes in the European Union.
Compassionate use programmes, which are set up at the level of individual EU Member States, are intended to give patients with a life-threatening, long-lasting or seriously disabling disease and no available treatment options, access to treatments that are still under development and that have not yet received a marketing authorisation.
In this case Estonia, Greece, the Netherlands and Romania requested an opinion from the CHMP on the conditions under which early access to remdesivir through compassionate use could be given to patients with COVID 19. In severe cases, COVID-19 can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, multi-organ failure and death.
Remdesivir has been shown to be active against SARS-CoV-2 and other types of coronavirus (i.e. SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV) in laboratory studies; however, there are currently only limited data on the use of remdesivir in patients with COVID 19.
The aim of the CHMP’s recommendations for remdesivir is to ensure a common approach regarding the criteria and conditions of its use prior to authorisation of compassionate use programmes by Member States. The recommendations are for EU Member States that are considering setting up such a programme and their implementation is not mandatory. In addition to describing which patients may benefit from the medicine, the recommendations explain how to use remdesivir and give preliminary information on its safety.
