Posts by Alyssa R. Letourneau, MD
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ACTT-1 Trial of Remdesivir Provides Preliminary Guidance About Good Candidates
Among patients on supplemental oxygen in the ACTT-1 trial, remdesivir significantly reduced the time to recovery, but, according to Massachusetts General Hospital clinicians, the trial neither demonstrated nor disproved a benefit for sicker or less sick patients.
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The Long-awaited Remdesivir Trial
With millions of cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection and nearly 350,000 deaths worldwide due to COVID-19 to date, the need for specific antiviral therapies is imperative. Multiple repurposed or newly developed antiviral treatments have been proposed. Many treatments for COVID-19 have been described in case series and retrospective cohort studies (May 8 FLARE), but few have been tested in a randomized controlled trial (May 11 FLARE). In tonight's FLARE, we review the publication of the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial-1 (ACTT-1), an RCT that resulted in the emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for remdesivir (Beigel et al. 2020).
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Superinfection in COVID-19
Although SARS-CoV-2 infection is responsible for COVID-19, it remains unclear whether viral-induced cell death per se is ultimately fully responsible for the clinical syndrome following infection.
Biography
Alyssa R. Letourneau, MD, MPH, received an ScB in neuroscience from Brown University and an MD from Yale University School of Medicine. She subsequently completed her residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital and a fellowship in infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women's Hospital. During her training, she received the Edward Kass Award for Clinical Excellence from the Massachusetts Infectious Disease Society and she completed her Master of Public Health at Harvard School of Public Health. She completed an additional year of clinical training in caring for immunocompromised hosts at Brigham & Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Dr. Letourneau is the Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Antimicrobial Stewardship Program and cares for patients both inpatient and in the clinic. Her clinical interest is seeing immunocompromised hosts including patients with leukemia, lymphoma, those who have undergone stem cell transplant as well as patients who will undergo immune modulating therapy.
In 2015, Dr. Letourneau was awarded the Morton N. Swartz Transformative Scholar Award from the Mass General Division of Infectious Diseases to study respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in immunocompromised hosts.
