The Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) trial has closed recruitment to the molnupiravir and Paxlovid comparisons.
RECOVERY has been testing the antiviral treatments, molnupiravir and Paxlovid, since early 2022. Participants recruited to the RECOVERY Trial are randomly allocated to receive one or more trial treatments plus usual standard-of-care, or usual standard-of-care on its own.
Over 1,000 people have been included in the molnupiravir and Paxlovid comparisons to date, but based on current recruitment rates it is unlikely that continuing them will improve the accuracy of the final results. As a result, the Trial Steering Committee have recommended that the trial stop recruiting participants to these comparisons.
Closing these comparisons will also allow collaborators to focus on completing recruitment to the two COVID-19 comparisons that remain open – sotrovimab (a monoclonal antibody treatment that sticks to the surface of the virus to stop it from infecting lung cells), and higher dose corticosteroids (which suppress inflammation in the lungs). The sotrovimab evaluation is open to all hospitalised patients, and the higher dose corticosteroid evaluation is open to hospitalised patients requiring ventilatory support. Results for higher dose corticosteroids for patients not on ventilatory support were published last month.
Dr Leon Peto, Senior Clinical Research Fellow at Oxford Population Health, said ‘Molnupiravir and Paxlovid are antiviral treatments that are known to be effective in mild COVID-19, but we don’t know if they work in patients being treated in hospital. Fortunately, the number of patients needing hospital treatment for COVID-19 is far lower than when we started testing these treatments last year, but this means that recruitment to the trial has slowed.
‘It now makes sense to analyse the data we’ve already collected on these two treatments, rather than continuing to recruit participants. Doing this will also let us focus on recruiting participants to the two promising COVID-19 treatments that remain in the trial; sotrovimab and higher dose corticosteroids.’
Analysis of the molnupiravir and Paxlovid comparisons will take place when the follow-up data for all participants are available, after which the results will be submitted for publication and made available on this website.