Arun Sanyal: the liver specialist leading some of Virginia’s earliest COVID-19 clinical trials
Before the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset in Virginia, Arun Sanyal, M.D., a liver specialist at VCU Health and associate director at the Wright Center, saw the promise of the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir against the disease. Determined to do right by patients, he contacted its manufacturers at Gilead Sciences, Inc. to push for VCU Health to be a clinical trial site, opening up access for patients when treatment options were scarce.
Because of Sanyal’s quick action, in March VCU Health became one of remdesivir’s first trial sites on the East Coast and in the country, eventually enrolling more than 70 participants in two trials of the drug before its emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration in May.
With his experience as a leader of global multi-site clinical trials for drugs targeting nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, Sanyal was perfectly poised to bring potential COVID-19 treatments to Richmond within a week of the announcement of the city’s first case.
But he didn’t stop there: he and hospital leaders worked swiftly with the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (VHHA) to make providers across Virginia aware of inpatient referral and transfer opportunities for the trials in case the drug could be useful for their patients with moderate to severe COVID-19 symptoms. Through it all, he never missed a morning round with COVID-19 inpatients and continued seeing liver patients and analyzing data with his team in the afternoons.
Since April, Sanyal, also a professor of internal medicine at VCU School of Medicine, has led several additional clinical trials to give patients access to more potential treatments.
Originally published on VCU Health’s intranet (VCU Health account required)
Categories Clinical Research, Clinical Trials