Clinicians from two hospitals in Boston report that the majority of even the sickest patients with COVID-19 - those who require ventilators in intensive care units - get better when they receive existing guideline-supported treatment for respiratory failure. The clinicians, who are from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, published their findings in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Several drugs approved for treating hepatitis C viral infection were identified as potential candidates against COVID-19, a new disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. This is the result of research based on extensive calculations using the MOGON II supercomputer at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). One of the most powerful computers in the world,

Most newly discharged patients who recently recovered from COVID-19 produce virus-specific antibodies and T cells, suggests a study published on May 3rd in the journal Immunity, but the responses of different patients are not all the same. While the 14 patients examined in the study showed wide-ranging immune responses, results from the 6 of them that were assessed at two weeks after discharge suggest that antibodies were maintained for at least that long.

While COVID-19 has infected millions of people worldwide and killed hundreds of thousands, there is currently no vaccine. In response, researchers have been evaluating the effectiveness of various antiviral drugs as possible COVID-19 treatments.

Pharmacy experts at the University of Huddersfield are urging caution over claims that widely-available antimalarial drugs could be a "magic bullet" to prevent and cure COVID-19. And the medicines can - if used rashly - have serious side effects.

Although there have been some encouraging signs from small-scale preliminary trials of the drugs chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) when administered to coronavirus patients, the results are preliminary and should be treated with care, argue Dr Syed Shahzad Hasan and Dr Hamid Merchant.

The hunt for an effective treatment for COVID-19 has led one team of researchers to find an improbable ally for their work: a llama named Winter. The team - from The University of Texas at Austin, the National Institutes of Health and Ghent University in Belgium - reports their findings about a potential avenue for a coronavirus treatment involving llamas on May 5 in the journal Cell.

A team of scientists from St. Michael's Hospital, Sinai Health and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre have launched a clinical trial to understand whether an existing drug used for HIV treatment and prevention may work to prevent COVID-19 infection.