A UNC research team led by Ross Boyce, MD, is conducting a randomized clinical trial on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in preventing novel coronavirus infections in U.S. healthcare workers. The study is funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), which hosts an established network of 850,000 clinicians and hundreds of health care systems. UNC is one of 18 sites participating.
Hydroxychloroquine is a drug used to treat malaria, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. Some successful cell studies have showed its effectiveness in treating the SARS coronavirus — a different strain of the current virus causing COVID-19 — a few years ago, according to Ross Boyce, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, who is leading the study at UNC. A paper released in Cell Research in March provided positive results regarding the drug’s effectiveness for treating the novel coronavirus.
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