Promising early results from a clinical trial (at a Chicago hospital) of Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir seem to have helped both U.S. stocks and Bitcoin.
On Thursday (April 16), health news outlet STAT reported that failed Ebola drug remdesivir has been used in a Gilead Phase 3 trial involving 125 COVID-19 patients at the University of Chicago Medical Center (aka “UChicago Medicine”); 113 of these patients had the severe form of the disease. All 125 patient were given remdesivir (administered intravenously).
UChicago Medicine’s Kathleen Mullane, who is supervising this study, is reported to have said during a video discussion with some of her colleagues:
“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish.”
Although this early sign of success is encouraging, it should be noted that there still have not been any results reported for any randomized, double-blind clinical trials of remdesivir.
Still, this bit of good news seems to have helped not only Gilead stock — currently (at 15:10 UTC on April 17) $82.91, up $6.37 (+8.32%) — but also U.S. stocks in general since if remdesivir is proven in the weeks/months to come as an effective treatment for COVID-19 and receives FDA approval, this will definitely help with the re-opening of the U.S. economy.
Of course, the other piece of good news for U.S. stocks is yesterday’s release of President Trump’s guidelines on the three phases of “Opening Up America Again”.
The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq are all in the green: +378.07 (+1.61%), +40.84 (+1.45), and +53.31 (+0.62%) respectively.
As for Bitcoin, which has been showing quite a high correlation with the S&P 500 in the past several weeks, although BTC-USD was trading as low as $6,579 at 00:00 UTC on April 16, currently, it is trading at $7,058, up 0.27% in the past 24-hour period:
Featured Image by “jarmoluk” via Pixabay.com
