On Mar. 12, 2020, Emory University announced it was participating in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) sponsored global clinical trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of novel therapeutic agents in hospitalized adult patients diagnosed with COVID-19. The drug remdesivir was the first agent to be evaluated.

The Emory Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (VTEU) was activated 3/11/2020 by The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), meaning it can begin enrollment as part of this phase three therapeutic clinical trial.

Emory is one of several sites being activated for the trial. The study will be conducted in up to 75 sites globally. Dr Aneesh Mehta, an investigator in both the national VTEU network and National Ebola Training and Education Center (NETEC), serves as the Emory principal investigator for this study. The Emory VTEU is led by Drs. Nadine Rouphael, Evan Anderson and Carlos Del Rio.

COVID-19 starts as an upper respiratory tract infection, often indistinguishable from other more common respiratory tract infections. First detected in Wuhan, China, the novel coronavirus has spread rapidly around the globe. Worldwide, the number of COVID-19 cases has topped 100,000, while in the United States the total has grown to more than 1,000.

Emory is playing a key role in the effort to expedite clinical trials to combat COVID-19. VTEUs have performed high-quality clinical research for more than half a century to test new vaccines and therapies for infectious diseases in clinical trials of adults and children. The Emory VTEU includes the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center and the Emory Children’s Center Vaccine Research Clinic, both renowned in clinical and translational research in infectious diseases vaccines, treatment and prevention.