COVID-19 potential drug remdesivir priced at $2,340 for a patient in US

Gilead Sciences Inc priced its COVID-19 antiviral remdesivir at $2,340 per patient for wealthier nations and agreed to send nearly all of its supply of the drug to the United States over the next three months.

The price tag is slightly below the range of $2,520 to $2,800 suggested last week by U.S. drug pricing research group the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) after British researchers said they found that the cheap, widely available steroid dexamethasone significantly reduced mortality among severely ill COVID-19 patients.

Remdesivir, a medicine once seen as a potential Ebola treatment, is the only branded drug to receive emergency use approval from US regulators for treating Covid-19.

Clinical trials of the drug, which is given intravenously, have found that it reduced the length of hospital stays for coronavirus patients by a statistically significant margin, although it did not reduce mortality rat