NEW DELHI: Gujarat based pharmaceutical major Zydus Cadila on Thursday announced the launch of Remdac, the company’s version of remdesivir, a drug that has been granted the emergency use authorisation to treat moderate Covid 19 patients in the country.
The drug by the firm, priced Rs 2,800 for a 100 mg vial of the injection, is set to be the most economical version of remdesivir in India.
The drug will be made available across India through the group’s strong distribution chain reaching out to government and private hospitals treating Covid patients, announced Zydus.
This assurance by the company assumes significance as there have been numerous reports of the drug’s acute shortage and even black marketing in several states that led to the distressed kin of infected patients being forced to procure it at much higher price than the indicated rate.
The drug is officially not to be sold in the open market and can be available only in hospitals on doctors' prescription for Covid 19 patients.
Zydus is the fifth company to launch a copy of the antiviral in India after Hetero Labs, Cipla, Mylan NV and Jubilant Life Sciences as these five companies had tied up with US based Gilead Sciences—which holds propriety rights for the Ebola drug.
The recommended dose for adults and paediatric patients is 200 mg on day 1 followed by once daily maintenance doses of 100 mg for five days.
The drug has emerged as one of the few repurposed medicines that has been found to help Covid 19 patients and the National Institutes of Health in the US had said in May had said that the drug’s clinical trial showed that it offers the most benefit for Covid-19 patients who need extra oxygen but do not require mechanical ventilation.
Results had shown that patients who received remdesivir had a 31 per cent faster time to recovery than those who received placebo. There is, however, no evidence so far to suggest that the medicine has any impact on mortalities related to the infection.
In June 2020, Zydus apart with some other Indian pharma companies entered into a non-exclusive agreement with Gilead to manufacture and sell remdesivir, the investigational drug, which has been issued an restricted use permission by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat patients suffering from severe symptoms of Covid 19.
“Remdac is the most affordable drug as we would like to enable patients to have access to this critical drug in the treatment of COVID 19”, said Sharvil Patel, the managing director of Cadila Healthcare on Thursday.