COVID-19 and the use of medicine off-label

8 February 2021

Sarah Ellson (pictured above, left), co-head of regulatory and life sciences and healthcare lawyer, Fieldfisher and her colleague Laura Penny, associate and regulatory lawyer, provide an Expert View on the topical issue of the use of medicines off-label.

In March 2020, the World Health Organization acknowledged that no pharmaceutical products had, at that point, been shown to be safe and effective for the treatment of COVID-19.

However, a number of medicines were being suggested as potential investigational therapies, and in due course many were studied in formal clinical trials. Some of the drugs trialled on COVID-19 patients included those normally used to treat HIV, pneumonia and Lyme disease, and drugs used for malaria prevention and rheumatoid arthritis.

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