Tarride member of national panel assessing oral treatments for COVID-19

CHEPA director Jean-Éric Tarride is a member of a new research platform, the “Canadian ADAptive Platform Trial of COVID-19 Therapeutics in Community Settings (Can-ADAPT COVID)”, led by Dr. Andrew Pinto, founder of the Upstream Lab, which will evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of oral medications for SARS-CoV-2 in non-hospitalized patients.

The CanTreatCOVID platform is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Therapeutics to be investigated will be decided through a transparent Canadian COVID-19 Therapeutics Advisory Panel.

The initial research will assess the efficacy of the oral antiviral drug nirmatrelvir/ritonavirold (marketed as a pill commonly known as Paxlovid) on high-risk COVID outpatients in 13 locations across Canada.

This initiative, which involves hundreds of primary care providers and researchers across Canada, will assess the impact of Paxlovid as a treatment when given on an outpatient basis to people with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 and who are at a high risk of a serious outcome from the disease. This includes people who are over 50 years of age, or are aged 18-49 with specific chronic medical or immunosuppressive conditions.

Study recruitment efforts will seek to include Indigenous and racially diverse communities, which are statistically at high risk of complications and death from COVID-19.

Paxlovid is a new drug that is meant to be taken at home by high-risk COVID patients to prevent them from getting so sick that they need to be hospitalized. The research will assess patient hospitalization and death rates after 28 days of treatment. It will also look at the drug’s impact on how long it takes a patient to recover, its impact on “long COVID”, health resource use treatment costs and cost per quality-adjust life-year (QALY), as well as symptom severity and quality of life.

Tarride, an economist, will conduct an economic evaluation of Paxlovid’s impact as part of the research.

For more information, email upstreamlab@smh.ca