NEW HAVEN — While the coronavirus spreads throughout the world, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine are looking into using drugs already on the market or close to being approved to treat COVID-19.

According to Dr. Naftali Kaminski, a pulmonary specialist at the Yale School of Medicine, one that soon will undergo a Phase 3 clinical trial is tocilizumab, marketed by Roche as Actemra, which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat rheumatoid arthritis. It is being looked at as a treatment of pneumonia associated with the coronavirus.

“One of the biggest problems with COVID-19 is that it’s a strange disease,” Kaminski said Tuesday. “It’s not like influenza or SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome]. The disease may start insidiously. Most of the people have mild symptoms or cough.”

However, the disease, which can severely impair the upper respiratory system, has a “relatively protracted course,” Kaminski said. “It could take weeks” before the patient recovers, and create a “hyperinflammatory situation,” in which the body’s immune system goes into overdrive.

Tocilizumab “actually inhibits this inflammation,” Kaminski said, but it isn’t always effective.

The medical research team also is looking at other drugs “that are either FDA-approved or very close to approval but we already know it is safe,” Kaminski said. “We have identified several of these candidates and have put in urgent [requests] with the FDA to approve.” He said he couldn’t name the drugs, however, at this stage of research but that two “originated at Yale. To see things come from your lab be implemented in an epidemic to treat your community, that is what you’ve trained for all your life.”

“If we had something that kills the virus, protects the lung from the injury it causes and inhibit the inflammation the virus causes, then the disease will not be lethal,” Kaminski said. “We’re looking at applications in every one of these directions.”

edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382