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The Irish team, which includes chemists and pharmacists, believe that taking it a certain way could help fight the virus

A team of Irish researchers may have found a new way to use an existing drug to treat Covid-19 patients in the early stages of the infection.

...the Irish team, which includes chemists and pharmacists, believe that inhaling it rather than taking it in tablet form, could be more effective while using a much lower dosage.

The ‘Eureka’ moment in changing the way the drug was used came to retired chemist John Farragher in the early hours during the early stages of lockdown. ...

He said: “I thought it was most desirable that the dose should be lowered but wondered how we might achieve this but still retain the efficacy.

“It looked impossible until it struck me that the disease is initially a respiratory infection and as such it could be treated in the lungs before it spread throughout the body.”

“Lungs constitute less than 2% of body weight so if we could treat them with a low dose of HCQ, about 2% of normal dose, we could avoid the side-effects and be just as effective at treating the disease. This was all based on the premise that the disease would be tackled very soon after the infection started, which is so much easier to say than to do.”

Professor Anne-Marie Healy, Professor of Pharmaceutics & Pharmaceutical Technology in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, said: “We propose that the effectiveness of HCQ may be improved, and the harm reduced, by targeting the drug to the lung by means of oral inhalation via nebulisation."

“Ordinarily reformulation and an altered route of administration of an existing drug would require toxicity and safety studies to be conducted related to the new formulation and the particular intended route of administration.

“In other words, you can’t just take a drug that’s normally delivered by the oral route and switch to delivering it via inhalation without demonstrating the safety of the new formulation and new route of administration (oral versus lung).”

However, the team found that an inhaled liquid formulation of HCQ was previously developed and tested in clinical trials for the treatment of asthma.

“The overall safety profile was good, and the drug was well tolerated. Importantly, no cardiac side effects were experienced by any of the clinical trial participants,” she said. ...

As for the future, Mr Farragher said: “One option is for a mass clinical trial to be performed by front-liners and other high risk groups.

"Such a trial could investigate the effectiveness of using such a device prophylactically.”

“Such a trial could start relatively quickly with relatively large numbers and could build on the safety data already in existence as a prophylactic drug.

“Our focus as a group at this moment is to get the message out to as wide an audience as possible. It is for others to advance it together with other emerging treatments in this highly fluid pandemic environment.”