Trial reportVirologica Sinica2020
A Small-Scale Medication of Leflunomide as a Treatment of COVID-19 in an Open-Label Blank-Controlled Clinical Trial.
Trial report in Virologica Sinica, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 82 citations in OpenAlex.
- Drug treatments for mild or moderate covid-19: systematic review and network meta-analysis.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2025Pooled it
- Clinical trials in COVID-19 management & prevention: A meta-epidemiological study examining methodological quality.Journal of clinical epidemiology · 2021Pooled it
- Immunomodulatory therapies for SARS-CoV-2 infection: a systematic literature review to inform EULAR points to consider.Annals of the rheumatic diseases · 2021Pooled it
- Treatment of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): a systematic review ofTheranostics · 2021Pooled it
- Leflunomide treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19: DEFEAT-COVID randomised controlled trial.BMJ open · 2023Trial
- Drug Repurposing as a Broad-Spectrum Strategy Against Coronaviruses: Frontiers in Mechanisms and Clinical Translation.Viruses · 2026Review
- Prevalence and Risk Factors of COVID-19 Reinfection in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Retrospective Observational Study.Yonsei medical journal · 2024Observational
- Classical swine fever virus non-structural protein 4A recruits dihydroorotate dehydrogenase to facilitate viral replication.Journal of virology · 2024Article
- Clinical characteristics and prognostic factors of COVID-19 in rheumatic patients and their family members: a retrospective study.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
- Multi-omics for COVID-19: driving development of therapeutics and vaccines.National science review · 2023Review
- Protein structure-based in-silico approaches to drug discovery: Guide to COVID-19 therapeutics.Molecular aspects of medicine · 2023Review
- An overview on the treatments and prevention against COVID-19.Virology journal · 2023Review
- An open-label randomized controlled trial of leflunomide in patients with acute SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant infection.Frontiers in medicine · 2023Article
- Leflunomide Confers Rapid Recovery from COVID-19 and is Coupled with Temporal Immunologic Changes.Journal of immunological sciences · 2023Article
- COVID-19 was not associated or trigger disease activity in spondylarthritis patients: ReumaCoV-Brasil cross-sectional data.Advances in rheumatology (London, England) · 2022Article
- Beyond the vaccines: a glance at the small molecule and peptide-based anti-COVID19 arsenal.Journal of biomedical science · 2022Review
- Saliva as Blood Alternative in Therapeutic Monitoring of Teriflunomide-Development and Validation of the Novel Analytical Method.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Inhibitors of Nucleotide Biosynthesis as Candidates for a Wide Spectrum of Antiviral Chemotherapy.Microorganisms · 2022Review
- Review
- Expanding the Repertoire of Low-Molecular-Weight Pentafluorosulfanyl-Substituted Scaffolds.ChemMedChem · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
12 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We recently reported that inhibitors against human dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH) have broad-spectrum antiviral activities including their inhibitory efficacies on SARS-CoV-2 replication in infected cells. However, there are limited data from clinical studies to prove the application of DHODH inhibitors in Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. In the present study, we evaluated Leflunomide, an approved DHODH inhibitor widely used as a modest immune regulator to treat autoimmune diseases, in treating COVID-19 disease with a small-scale of patients. Cases of 10 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients of moderate type with obvious opacity in the lung were included. Five of the patients were treated with Leflunomide, and another five were treated as blank controls without a placebo. All the patients accepted standard supportive treatment for COVID-19. The patients given Leflunomide had a shorter viral shedding time (median of 5 days) than the controls (median of 11 days, P = 0.046). The patients given Leflunomide also showed a significant reduction in C-reactive protein levels, indicating that immunopathological inflammation was well controlled. No obvious adverse effects were observed in Leflunomide-treated patients, and they all discharged from the hospital faster than controls. This preliminary study on a small-scale compassionate use of Leflunomide provides clues for further understanding of Leflunomide as a potential antiviral drug against COVID-19.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.