COVID-19: Zydus Cadila gets DCGI nod for phase-III clinical trials

Ahmedabad based Zydus Cadila Pharmaceuticals has announced that the company has received an approval from the Drugs Controller General of India -DCGI to begin the phase-III clinical trials with its biological therapy Pegylated Interferon alpha-2b (PegiHep) in Covid-19 patients.

PegiHep is an approved drug and is being re-purposed for the treatment of Covid-19. According to sources, the trials will be conducted on 250 patients across 25 centres in India during this month. The Ahmedabad-based healthcare major had completed the phase-2 clinical trial last month. The second phase trials indicated that this biological drug had a beneficial impact on the patient suffering from moderate Covid-19 disease by reducing their viral load. According to sources, a single dose therapy will improve compliance and make it highly affordable for patients.

Apart from this, Zydus has also completed the phase-II human clinical trials of its vaccine candidate- ZyCov-D for Covid-19 and its results are currently analysed.