Pneumonia, Viral

A Phase 2a, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multiple ascending dose study in patients who are hospitalized with presumed pneumonia requiring supplemental oxygen therapy. The purpose of this study is to examine the safety, tolerability and efficacy of AV-001 Injection administration daily to the earlier of day 28 or EOT (day prior to hospital discharge). A total of 120 eligible patients (20 patients in each of cohort 1, 2 and 3 and 60 patients in cohort 4) will be recruited from up to 25 participating institutions/hospitals. Patients will be randomized in a 1:1 ratio to receive either AV-001 Injection or AV-001 placebo Injection, together with standard of care (SOC).

Almost 90 out of 100 people carry herpes simplex viruses (HSV). Once a person has been infected with the herpes viruses, he or she can't get rid of them for the rest of her/his life. For the most part, the viruses are in a dormant state. Only when the immune system is weakened, for example in the case of a serious illness or stress, are the viruses reactivated. They then mainly cause cold sores, which are harmless for healthy people and usually heal without therapy. However, especially in people with a weakened immune system, HSV can also cause serious infections, such as meningitis. In almost every second mechanically ventilated patient in intensive care who has pneumonia, HSV can be detected in the respiratory tract. This is caused by reactivation of the viruses as a result of the severe underlying disease and stress during intensive care therapy. Whether treatment of the herpes viruses (e.g. with acyclovir) is necessary in this situation and helps the patients to cure has not been clarified, especially as acyclovir can also cause side effects such as a deterioration in kidney function. Currently, the physicians decide to treat the herpes viruses in about half of the patients. Several studies have shown that patients for whom the physician decided to treat the viruses survived more often. However, all of these studies looked at the course of the disease only retrospectively and thus are subject to many biases (including physician selection of who receives treatment, missing data). A definitive conclusion as to whether herpesvirus therapy can be recommended cannot be drawn without doubt from these studies. Therefore, the investigators would like to investigate in a randomized controlled trial, i.e. patients are randomly assigned to the experimental (therapy of herpesviruses) or control group (no therapy of herpesviruses), the effect of therapy with acyclovir on survival in ventilated intensive care patients with lower respiratory tract infection (pneumonia) in whom a large amount of HSV was found in the respiratory tract. The goal of the study is to provide clarity on whether therapy will help patients recover.

The AI-based system designed to process chest computed tomography (CT) aims to 1) detect the presence of pathologic patterns associated with interstitial changes in pneumonia; 2) highlight areas on the images with the probable presence of pathologies; 3) provide the physician with the results of image processing, including quantitative indicators of suspected viral pneumonia related lung changes according to visual pulmonary lesion grading system (CT0-4). The retrospective study aims to demonstrate the clinical validation of the AI-based system. Clinical validation measures (sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under the ROC curve) will be determined to provide evidence about the clinical efficacy of the AI-based system. The hypothesis is that the measures of clinical validation of the AI-based system differ by no more than 8% from those declared by the manufacturer.