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China has suspended two clinical trials for Gilead Science's experimental coronavirus drug, remdesivir, saying the "epidemic has been controlled well at present."
According to an April 15 notice on the U.S. National Library of Medicine's ClinicalTrials website, the trials were postponed as "no eligible patients can be recruited."
Fox News has reached out to remdesivir developer Gilead Sciences with a request for comment on this story.
China, which recently reopened the city of Wuhan, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, reported a significantly higher number of coronavirus cases on Friday than the previous four days, adding 358 cases to bring its total to 83,760 as of April 17.
GILEAD GIVES UPDATE ON EXPERIMENTAL CORONAVIRUS TREATMENT
In the prior four days, the number of new cases in China ranged from 48 on the low end to 90 on the high end. In late March, scientists warned of a "second wave" if Wuhan ended its social distancing policies too early.
China reopened Wuhan on April 7, Fox News previously reported.
The country also recently revised the death toll in the city of Wuhan. As of April 16, the death toll stood at 3,346, but it jumped to 4,636 on Friday morning, a rise of nearly 39 percent.
There have been accusations from U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that China has underreported the number of cases in the country.
On Thursday, health news site STAT reported the experimental drug showed promise in a Chicago clinical trial.
STAT reported that patients in the Phase III trial experienced rapid recoveries from fever and respiratory symptoms. Nearly all patients were discharged in less than a week, it said.
A spokeswoman for the University of Chicago Medicine said no conclusions should be drawn. “Partial data from an ongoing clinical trial is by definition incomplete and should never be used to draw conclusions about the safety or efficacy of a potential treatment that is under investigation," the spokeswoman told Fox News in an email. "In this case, information from an internal forum for research colleagues concerning work in progress was released without authorization. Drawing any conclusions at this point is premature and scientifically unsound.”
A Gilead spokeswoman echoed those sentiments. "Anecdotal reports, while encouraging, do not provide the statistical power necessary to determine the safety and efficacy profile of remdesivir as a treatment for COVID-19," she said in an email to Fox News. "We expect the data from our Phase 3 study in patients with severe COVID-19 infection to be available at the end of this month, and additional data from other studies to become available in May."
Investors responded positively to the report, nonetheless, sending Gilead shares up more than 8 percent in early Friday trading.
The report comes less than a week after a small research study revealed that remdesivir is showing early promise in the battle against the coronavirus outbreak.
The study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was supported by Gilead Sciences.
Remdesivir is still awaiting regulatory approval as a coronavirus treatment.
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As of Friday morning, more than 2.1 million coronavirus cases have been diagnosed worldwide, more than 671,000 of which are in the U.S., the most impacted country on the planet.
Fox Business' R.N. White and Fox News’ James Rogers and Frank Miles contributed to this article.
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