La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company to provide Giapreza (Angiotensin II) for emergency medical program in patients with septic shock due to COVID-19 at CHIREC Delta Hospital, Brussels, Belgium.

La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company announced that it is providing Giapreza (angiotensin II) for an emergency medical program in patients with septic shock due to COVID-19 at the Centre Hospitalier Interrégional Edith Cavell (CHIREC) Delta Hospital in Brussels, Belgium. Giapreza is being made available for emergency medical use based on a request from Professor Daniel De Backer, M.D., Head, Department of Intensive Care, CHIREC Delta Hospital in Brussels, Belgium.

According to Belgian law, authorized medicines can be made available prior to commercial availability in order to fulfill special patient needs.Giapreza has been recently approved by the European Commission but is not yet commercially available in Europe.

In a report on 44,672 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (Wu et al, JAMA 2020; doi:10.1001/jama.2020.2648), approximately 14% of patients required hospitalization, and, among those, one-third became critically ill. Patients who became critically ill developed respiratory failure, septic shock and/or multiple organ failure. Approximately one-half of the critically ill patients died.