Post from Community: Medical College of Wisconsin joins national research effort to study new COVID-19 treatments in non-hospitalized patients | Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service
Kerri Allen
December 1, 2020
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COVID-19 patients recovering at home are the focus of a new clinical trial at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) that will study the newest, most effective treatments for the disease.
The trial, ACTIV-2, is a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study with sites all across the nation. It is geared specifically toward non-hospitalized patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the last six days. With the medical community’s knowledge of COVID-19 progressing each day, this study is built to be adaptive. As new treatments for the disease are developed, ACTIV-2 patient participants will benefit. If a therapy appears effective, it can be advanced rapidly to testing in larger groups of volunteers.
“Current ACTIV-2 patients across the nation are receiving an antibody treatment that has proven to be very encouraging, and we expect a rapid acceleration of additional treatments in the near future,” said Zouyan Lu, MD, assistant professor of infectious disease at MCW and principal investigator of the study. “The ACTIV-2 trial is an exciting opportunity for patients in southeastern Wisconsin to access to the nation’s most effective COVID-19 therapies.”
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ACTIV-2 was established as part of NIH’s Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV), a public-private partnership program created to speed development of the most promising treatments and vaccines.
MCW is currently the only participating site in Wisconsin. Eventually, MCW will also be enrolling patients for the ACTIV-3 trial, similar to ACTIV-2, but for patients who are hospitalized.
Over the course of one month, volunteers will have in-person visits with a doctor to check on the status of their health. Throughout the following several months, they will also have phone calls or video chats from home with a researcher.
Those interested in participating can visit https://www.riseabovecovid.org/en to learn more.