A UK trial of potential Covid-19 treatments has started to enroll patients in other countries in the hope of speeding up results, Oxford University said on Thursday. CNN reported that the RECOVERY trial looks at whether existing drugs can be used to treat the virus. The trial has enrolled more than 36,000 hospital patients in the UK since March 2020 and is now expanding to countries including Indonesia and Nepal.

“The Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) Trial, the world’s largest clinical trial for Covid-19 treatments, has now expanded internationally with Indonesia and Nepal among the first countries to join. The first patients have been recruited to RECOVERY International,” the trial said in a news release.

Peter Horby, professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases and Global Health at Oxford, said he hoped that expanding the trial internationally would enable researchers to assess potential treatments more quickly. Calling the trial an “enormous success” he said that the trial has enrolled “over 36,000 patients and (is) delivering clear results on six treatments already.”

“By building on this success through international partnership we can speed up the assessment of novel treatments, increase the global relevance of the trial results, build capacity, and reduce wasted efforts on small uninformative studies,” he said.

“It is particularly important to find readily and affordable treatments for Covid-19 that can be used worldwide… RECOVERY International will help us to identify effective treatments that can be used in less well-resourced settings,” he added.