It’s a bit like a fish biting its tail. People with long Covid suffer from significant fatigue. Frequently, this completely or partially prevents them from working. They are therefore impatiently awaiting the arrival on the market of a drug that would allow them to alleviate their symptoms, or even completely cure them. However, before being marketed, drugs must be tested on two groups, one receiving a placebo and the other the remedy, in order to demonstrate their effectiveness.
And therein lies the whole problem. Given the patients’ fatigue, it is physically too hard for them to go to the study site regularly. Researchers from the University of Basel, gathered around neurologist Dominique de Quervain, had to abandon testing fampridine on people with long Covid. “Unfortunately, we had to interrupt the study due to recruitment difficulties,” confirms Dominique de Quervain, in the “Aargauer Zeitung”. Although he needed at least 44 people, he was only able to gather 7 volunteers.
All hopes now rest on two new studies. The company Berlin Cures is preparing to test BC 007. By calling on volunteers from several European countries, the company has assembled a panel of more than a hundred people. Initially, she only wanted to work with patients who had been ill for less than a year. But this criterion had to be abandoned, in order to find enough people. Finally, the University of Zurich plans to test a maritime pine plant extract in 2025.
