3 April 2020 - During an extraordinary virtual meeting held on 2 April 2020, EMA’s CHMP gave recommendations on how the investigational antiviral medicine remdesivir should be used for treating coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in compassionate use programmes in the European Union.

Compassionate use programmes, which are set up at the level of individual EU Member States, are intended to give patients with a life-threatening, long-lasting or seriously disabling disease and no available treatment options, access to treatments that are still under development and that have not yet received a marketing authorisation.

In this case Estonia, Greece, the Netherlands and Romania requested an opinion from the CHMP on the conditions under which early access to remdesivir through compassionate use could be given to patients with COVID‑19. In severe cases, COVID-19 can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, multi-organ failure and death.

Read EMA press release