The Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) Trial, the world’s largest clinical trial for COVID-19 treatments, has now expanded internationally with Indonesia and Nepal among the first countries to join. The first patients have been recruited to RECOVERY International.
Peter Horby, Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases and Global Health in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, and Joint Chief Investigator for the trial, says, ‘The RECOVERY trial has been an enormous success, enrolling over 37,000 patients and delivering clear results on six treatments already. By building on this success through international partnership we can speed up the assessment of novel treatments, increase the global relevance of the trial results, build capacity, and reduce wasted efforts on small uninformative studies.’
‘It is particularly important to find readily available and affordable treatments for COVID-19 that can be used worldwide. RECOVERY International will help us to identify effective treatments that can be used in less well-resourced settings’ he added.
The RECOVERY trial was launched rapidly in the UK in March 2020 to investigate if any existing treatments were effective against COVID-19. It is open to all patients admitted to NHS hospitals with COVID-19, with more than 36,000 patients recruited so far. The trial has already delivered results that have changed clinical care, including the findings that the inexpensive steroid, dexamethasone, and the anti-inflammatory treatment, tocilizumab, significantly reduce the risk of death when given to hospitalised patients with severe COVID-19.