Maulin Patel1, Eduardo Dominguez2, Daniel Sacher2, Parag Desai2, Ashwin Chandar3, Michael Bromberg3, Roberto Caricchio4, Gerard J Criner2. 1. Department of Thoracic Medicine and Surgery, Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Electronic address: maulin.patel@tuhs.temple.edu. 2. Department of Thoracic Medicine and Surgery, Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. 3. Department of Hematology and Oncology, Temple University Hospital, Philadelphia, PA. 4. Department of Rheumatology, Temple University Hospital, Philadelphia, PA.
To the Editor:We would like to thank Delgado-Lopez et al for their response to our original manuscript. We agree with the sentiment echoed by the writers that, after failure of various antiinflammatory-like corticosteroids and biologic therapies (anti IL-6, anti-IL-1), etoposide has a role in selective patients who still have laboratory and clinical data suggestive of hyperinflammatory syndromes.
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Although the authors have reported on eleven patients with coronavirus disease 2019 who were treated with etoposide as salvage therapy in June 2020, our initial submission was in April 2020 at which time none of the publications had reported any such cases. We are, however, very happy to see the results from the authors’ case series reporting similar outcomes as ours. We, like the authors, await the result of the ongoing clinical trial NCT04356690, which will shed more light on the safety and efficacy of etoposide in coronavirus disease 2019.