Russia's Anti-COVID Drug Can Tackle Delta & Omicron Variants, Medication's Developer Says

The Russian antiviral can also alleviate the symptoms and drastically decrease the duration of the coronavirus disease, while the pathogen cannot develop resistance to the drug.

Pharmaceutical company ChemRar Group has announced that the Russian antiviral drug Avifavir, based on favipiravir, is effective against different variants of COVID-19, such as Delta and Omicron, due to the drug being able to affect the replication systems of an RNA virus, which are highly conservative and mutation-resistant.

According to a press release issued by the company, clinical trials have also confirmed that the coronavirus cannot develop resistance to the drug, and that the antiviral can alleviate the symptoms of the afflicted and decrease the duration of the disease by half when compared to standard therapy.

"Having accumulated extensive experience with Avifavir in patients infected with COVID both from clinical trials and real-world clinical practice, we see that taking Avifavir in the first 3–5 days after infection leads to a milder disease in most cases and prevents hospitalisation", said Elena Yakubova, ChemRar Group’s medical director. "Over the past 17 months, more than 4 million patients have been treated with favipiravir worldwide. The product was well tolerated with no new adverse events, which confirms the high safety of favipiravir".

Former US CDC Director Robert Redfield also noted that Avifavir "has been shown to be effective against COVID-19 in clinical trials and medical practice", and suggested that studying the combination of the drug "with other antivirials such as Paklovid (Pfizer) could offer even better therapeutic options for those at higher risk of COVID-19 disease progression, reduce the likelihood of drug-resistant virus mutations, and increase the time after diagnosis when therapy can be effective".

Antiviral medication Avifavir was developed and released by ChemRar Group with the support of the Russian Direct Investment Fund in June 2020, becoming the world’s first anti-COVID drug.

The antiviral has been used extensively in Russian clinics to treat the coronavirus disease since last year, and has been supplied to more than 15 other countries.