Baricitinib, a Covid-19 Drug from Eli Lilly, Is Expensive And Doesn't Do Much - The New York Times

Baricitinib, an arthritis drug made by Eli Lilly, may reduce recovery time by a day, but costs about $1,500 and comes with side effects.

The drug, baricitinib, was granted an emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration to treat a subset of hospitalized Covid-19 patients in combination with another medication, the antiviral remdesivir.

And at a cost of roughly $1,500 per patient, many doctors don’t know when it would make sense to use the drug, which might have overlapping roles with cheap and widely available steroids like dexamethasone.

In a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with baricitinib and remdesivir recovered one day faster than patients who had received remdesivir alone.

Baricitinib is a repurposed arthritis treatment that, like a steroid, dampens inflammation, which, in severe cases of Covid-19, can spiral out of control and destroy healthy tissues.

trial was designed to test whether baricitinib could boost the benefits of remdesivir, now the standard of care for Covid-19 patients.

The drug is now allowed to be paired with remdesivir, but only to hospitalized patients who need supplemental oxygen, mechanical ventilation or other breathing support.

But this same population of patients — people sick enough to need some form of breathing support — would also be great candidates for steroids like dexamethasone, said Dr.

Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious disease physician at Emory University who pioneered early studies of baricitinib against the coronavirus, offered a more sobering perspective on dexamethasone.

Tien and other experts echoed this sentiment, saying they would be likely to choose dexamethasone over baricitinib when treating someone with a serious case of Covid-19, unless there was an obvious reason their patient might respond poorly to steroids.

A head-to-head comparison between baricitinib and dexamethasone might clarify which patients would be better off taking one drug over another.

announced a trial that will compare outcomes between hospitalized Covid-19 patients who receive either a combination of remdesivir and dexamethasone, or a combination of remdesivir and baricitinib

Eli Lilly is also running a trial to study the effects of baricitinib on its own in hospitalized patients