Coronavirus In North Alabama: In-Depth with Dr. Richard Miers

Najahe Sherman talks with Dr.Richard Miers about ongoing Coronavirus concerns.

Part Three.

>> najahe sherman: welcome back.

Every night at 6:00 p.m.

We are taking you deeper into the impact of the coronavirus.

Tonight i am joined by dr. richard myers, the president and science director for hudsonalpha institute for bio technology.

It's a pleasure to have you with us tonight.

One of the glimmers of hope for the coronavirus treatment is the drug remdesivir.

We know uab has been working on clinical studies involving the drug.

Is hudsonalpha looking into any of that?

>> no.

We're not working on it directly.

We do a lot of work with uab.

And we have a special relationship with uab.

They deserve an enormous congratulations.

That drug was actually developed there and then was then developed as a treatment years ago in at tenting to use it for something else in a biotech/pharmaceutical company.

And it's coming back.

As you probably have heard the preliminary clinical trials are showing that it helped some people.

It doesn't help everybody but it helps some people and it helps to diminish the severity of the symptoms in some people.

And i know that uab was doing several clinical trial-type studies to try to get as fast as we can what should we be doing with this drug and others.

And i think everyone will say no one drug is going to be the magic bullet.

It's going to be a combination of things.

But thank goodness we already have this one.

One reason that it works to -- that we learned this so quickly, it had already been developed for another reason years ago.

The safety studies had already been done so they actually knew that they could give certain doses and it would be safe for people.

That led to the clinical trials being really rapid.

So that's why we no what we know so far.

>> najahe sherman: we have about 20 seconds left.

Quickly, what other treatment opt options are being researched?

>> i think one of the other ones are one of the things we're working on are antibody-based treatments.

One where you artificially make