June 16, 2020
Summit Health patients with active COVID-19 infection can participate in a clinical research study being led by New York University and the Montreal Heart Institute and supervised at Summit Health by Dr. Lauren Kennish (Rheumatology). Colchicine is an anti-inflammatory drug that is used to treat other inflammatory conditions, such as gout. COVID-19 can cause people to get severely ill partly due to the body’s overly robust immune response to the virus. Colchicine dampens some parts of that type of immune response. The study’s goal is to determine whether short-term treatment with colchicine reduces the need for hospitalization, lung complication requiring mechanical ventilation and death related to COVID-19.