What’s the next step for Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy...?
And when can patients get it?
Over the past two weeks, we have examined the preprint report on the efficacy of Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy for the treatment of Long Covid. (Ref 1 below)
We reviewed the data showing that 80% of Long Covid patients recovered and had both their clinical symptoms and molecular level microclotting and platelet activation resolve after taking Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy.
So, problem solved! Right?
Everyone can get Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy and start living a happy and active life again while feeling healthy and energetic…
Well, no so fast.
In reality, even though Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy clearly had a health benefit for the Long Covid patients in that small study (of 91 patients), several additional steps have to happen before the majority of Long Covid patients can get the treatment.
So let’s take a look at the road ahead for Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy and what Long Covid patients can expect both now and in the future.
What’s Next for Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy?
Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy was used to treat Long Covid in a small study of 91 patients and had clear benefits on both clinical symptoms and molecular pathophysiology (microclots and platelet hyperactivation).
So what has to happen before patients can go to their physician and get a prescription for it?
The two most dreaded words in biomedical sciences: Clinical Trials.
Science and Medicine both like certainty when testing hypotheses about whether a specific drug or combination therapy can actually treat a disease. Certainty tends to require a large amount of data. It requires an experiment to be repeated over and over and over again, until enough data has been collected to be certain that if you do X, then Y will happen.
So the next steps for Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy is really for the experiment to be repeated. Over and over again. On increasingly large populations of Long Covid patients. Until enough data is collected to be certain that if you give a Long Covid patient Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy, they will likely recover. And whether they recover or not, there needs to be certainty that at least the patient will not be harmed.
Now the good part about Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy is that all of the drugs that make up the treatment are already FDA-approved, used clinically, and relatively safe. The biggest safety issue is the risk of bleeding (discussed here), and physicians know how to monitor for that.
The bad part is that certainty takes TIME.
And in this case, that time will be spent testing Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy in clinical trials.
Now I’ll be honest and say that I am not an expert at designing clinical trials. But I have been working in drug discovery and development long enough to know that before Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy is widely adopted for use to treat Long Covid, it is going to have to go through a large-scale, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial. Ideally, it would be a multi-centered clinical trial as well, with patient sites in multiple locations (usually large University or Government Hospitals), perhaps even in multiple countries.
That kind of clinical trial takes YEARS.
My best guess would be that it will take 3-5 years to get Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy through clinical trials, working at the “normal speed” of science and medicine. And that would be if people started right now. That effort would also likely include a handful of smaller trials (100’s to 1000’s of patients) of steadily increasing size to provide the data necessary to justify and conduct the large-scale trial.
IF Long Covid were declared a crisis and a more”war-time” attitude taken about it, as was done during Covid in 2020 and 2021, you could probably get the clinical trials done in 6-12 months.
But I don’t see anyone that is treating Long Covid as an emergency or a crisis right now, other than the people that suffer from it.
Can Long Covid Patients get Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy?
Currently, each of the individual drugs in Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy is approved for human use by the FDA. Physicians are able to prescribe each of those drugs for the approved use AND for “off-label” use as they see fit.
But, as we said above, the use of all those drugs together as a combination therapy for Long Covid has not been tested in clinical trials.
While each of the drugs is safe on its own, and none of the 91 patients in the study in the preprint experienced any safety issues, most physicians are likely going to want to see data from a large clinical trial or at least multiple, repeated small clinical trials before they will prescribe Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy. Physicians like to have protocols and data supporting the use of a combination therapy before they prescribe it. For safety reasons, for ethical reasons (does this even work?), and for liability reasons.
But each doctor can make their own choice. (At least for right now…)
So if you’re suffering from Long Covid, print out the preprint (in the link below), take it to your physician, and ask if they would consider prescribing it. The worst the physician can say is “No”.
If they say yes, you have an 80% chance of recovering from Long Covid.
And unless you’re willing to ask your own physician about it, Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy likely will not be available until after it’s undergone extensive evaluation in clinical trials.
So to summarize:
The next steps forward for Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy are testing, testing, and more testing followed by clinical trials, clinical trials, and more clinical trials.
When Science and Medicine are done with all that, then patients can get it. Probably…
In the meantime, the Medical Establishment is leaving Long Covid patients to manage their symptoms the best they can, hopefully with the help of a physician (if patients can find one that believes in Long Covid…).
If you do have a good physician, you may be able to get Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy before it’s studied in clinical trials. It never hurts to ask.
But the hard truth is that for most people, Triple Anti-Coagulant Therapy will not be available any time in the near future.
As a Medicinal Chemist, that leads me to ask the next logical question:
Are there any natural remedies or over-the-counter (OTC) products or ingredients that can help Long Covid patients with their health and recovery?
I’ll be talking about the answers to that question in my next post. Stay tuned!
Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think of this post.
To follow my research, subscribe to my Substack!
And if you like watching videos, check out and follow my TikTok!
Reference
Treatment of Long COVID symptoms with triple anticoagulant therapy. Research Square Pre-Print 2023, rs-2697680/v1. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2697680/v1