A little less than a month ago a study published on Nature turned the spotlight on an old drug, cheap and already available, used to treat a liver disease called primary biliary cholangitis.
The authors of the work explored a possible unpublished quality of ursodeoxycholic acid (Udca), an off-patent medicine that is taken by mouth: the ability to prevent Covid-19 by blocking all variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus – present and future – the gateway to target organ cells.
And they explained that the results observed in organoids (miniaturized models of organs manufactured in the laboratory), animals, human organs and a small group of healthy volunteers, needed to be confirmed in larger clinical studies. While science is taking its course, however, the demand for the drug has already soared in China.
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Among the main world producers of ursodeoxycholic acid, among other things, there is an Italian company, Ice Group, based in Reggio Emilia, acquired by the international investment fund Advent International in October 2019.
The demand for the generic drug has increased significantly in the Asian giant, found an analysis of the active service in the field of news and data of the pharmaceutical sector «Scrip Intelligence», bounced on various media and also mentioned in the news of US universities.
But manufacturers say they can’t keep up and experts warn of the limited nature of the only study available at the moment on the Covid front. Study which, according to Scrip reports, has aroused great interest in China grappling with the explosion of infections in recent days.
The effect is that, overnight, UDCA has become a highly sought-after drug. Some doctors have begun to suggest it as a preventative weapon in high-risk patients. The boom in demand is having an impact on the economic front: in the wake of this phenomenon, in fact, according to the analysis published in this regard, the Chinese drug producers Xuantai Pharma and New China Pharma have seen share prices rise with increases between 53 % and 69% in the past few weeks.