Hospitals in New York are giving Covid-19 patients heartburn medicine to see if it helps fight the virus, according to the doctor who initiated the trial.
Preliminary results of the clinical trial of famotidine, the active ingredient in Pepcid, could come out in the next few weeks, said Dr. Kevin Tracey, president of Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health, which runs 23 hospitals in the New York City area.
So far, 187 patients have enrolled in the clinical trial, and Northwell eventually hopes to enroll 1,200, he said.
“There are many examples in the history of medicine where a drug that was designed for one purpose turns out to have an effect in another disease,” Tracey said.He said if famotidine works — and that’s a big if at this point — it would be easy to use it on a widespread scale.
“It’s generic, it’s plentiful and it’s inexpensive,” he said.
But he emphasized that it might not work.
“We don’t know if it has any benefit. We really don’t. I swear we don’t,” he said. “People are hoping for anything. But we need to do this clinical trial.”
He also emphasized that the patients in the study are in the hospital taking mega-doses intravenously — doses about nine times what someone would normally take for heartburn.
“You should not go to the drugstore and take a bunch of heartburn medicine,” he said.
