Interim findings from the WHO Solidarity trial
Repurposed antiviral drugs – remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir and interferon – to treat COVID-19 appear to have little or no effect on patients hospitalised for the disease, in terms of overall mortality, initiation of ventilation and duration of hospital stay. The interim findings from the WHO Solidarity trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), followed 11,266 adults at 405 hospitals in 30 countries.
The full press release from the University of Bristol is available
Investigators’ Meetings for By-Band-Sleeve trial
This year the extended By–Band–Sleeve trial team were separated, and most annoyingly, could not get together for their annual meal after the Investigators’ Meeting! Sadly, it seems that the “new normal” does not come with dinner…
We wrote to the teams at our 12 participating sites asking for their preferred method of meeting, and the unanimous response was to meet as usual but this time via Zoom. We offered two dates, so that colleagues were not tied to the screen for too long. We ended up with a large imbalance, with most preferring the second date, but thanks to our very flexible and amenable site teams we were able to even out the attendance at both dates.
Below are some photos of the assembled teams across the two dates. We are pleased with how this year’s meetings went, and we would use a similar method in future if face-to-face is not possible. For future online meetings, we would aim to pre-send some sweets or snacks to our teams to share on the day, and perhaps then we wouldn’t miss our team dinner quite as much!
You can read more about the By-Band-Sleeve trial at the Bristol Trials Centre website.
The By-Band-Sleeve trial was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme (project number 09/127/53). The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the HTA, NIHR, NHS or the Department of Health and Social Care.
