Coronavirus In North Alabama: In Depth

Dr Ali Hassoun, an Infectious Disease Specialist with Huntsville Hospital

>> najahe sherman: welcome back.

Every night at 6:00 we are taking you deeper into the impact of the coronavirus.

Tonight i am joined by dr. ali hassoun, an infectious disease special list at huntsville hospital.

And we've been discussing doctors are seeing hope in the search for coronavirus treatment , the drug remdesivir is helping patients recover more than 30% faster than others.

Dr. pam hudson with cropt says the drug is available at local hospitals.

She added the hospital has a protocol in place to determine which patients receive the drug.

>> dr. hudson: the clinicians get together and they decide here are the situations where we might utilize a particular treatment.

And so those protocols are followed, depending on the patient's condition and the circumstances.

And so i wouldn't know whether it had been used in any particular cases.

I believe it has been used in our community, but that's how it's decided.

>> najahe sherman: dr. pam hudson said the drug has been available locally for weeks.

And dr. pam hudson says cropt has a team of doctors who decide the protocols surrounding the drug.

Does huntsville hospital have something similar and how do you decide who corrects it?

Doctor?

>> so yeah.

Najahe, you know we definitely try in huntsville hospital as well as in crestwood to be enrolling our patient in research studies because most of the available modalities of therapies not f.d.a.

Approve t.

We cefntly tried hydroxy chloroquine sometimes with sight row myosin with other medication that help fight the inflammation maition.

There's things we have definitely tried to see if it's beneficial.

We have not used remdesivir because it hasn't been available for our community because it's a study medicine.

And as a study research side it hasn't been easy to get to these it's really in a much bigger academic centers that they have it.

>> najahe sherman: when it comes to these type of studies do you conduct your own or share your findings with other research hospitals?

>> so we always -- any research, you know, after we get permission from our institutional review board, we run these studies and try to share it either through peer reviews or publication and journals to make sure everybody will benefit from these information.

To get an idea which patient population will benefit, but also at the same time what's the safety toxicity effectiveness.

All this usually gets shared.

But in general, when we share it , we'll have more complete information before we can share it.

Or preliminary very promising data that we end up saying there might be something you guys need to know in other hospital or academic centers.

>> najahe sherman: let's talk about huntsville hospital's partnership with hudson alpha to create a therapy for the virus.

What are you testing to find the answers that you're looking for?

>> so this collaboration, and actually i'm involved on the huntsville hospital side as a primary investigator, it came up several weeks ago where hudson alpha approached because they have really access through their several companies to do high- tech molecular testing where they can -- are able to find out in those who's infected with the coronavirus what cell specifically can fight that virus.

And by finding that out, they can find out if that cell will produce what we call antibody.

The antibody's the specific protein that can fight the virus and kill it sometime actually.

So what's exciting about this research, we're going to collaborate and those patients who get admitted to the hospital with covid and we get permission from them, we take blood from them and send it to hudson alpha for analysis.

In that analysis they're going to be able at different stages of their disease to know what that specific antibody or protein.

And by flowing that, actually they can be able to multiply that protein or antibody and manufacture that later on.

And it can be used as a therapy.

This is actually very exciting because till now, apart from the remdesivir with showing possibility of benefit, there hasn't been any e specific effective therapy except for talking about convalescent plasma.

So this would be -- if turn out to be positive, if they can find that specific antibody, can manufacture it, we'll be really, really great.

But this is an early phase.

We hopefully starting this study soon in the next few weeks.

And this will continue for sel months to get to the best information we can.

>> najahe sherman: that is absolutely fascinating and really tremendous that it's happening here in our community.

When do you tentatively expect to start seeing some results?

>> i'm hoping in few month.

Probably in about two month from now we'll get some more information about if they were able to know the specific antibody and protein.

And the moment they get to know that, because i can tell you they already had some preliminary data from china on several patients, they might -- or we might be able to get in touch with other companies who can