Regeneron’s COVID antibody drug provides long term protection in clinical trial
pharmafile | November 9, 2021 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals have said that a single dose of its antibody COVID cocktail reduces the risk of contracting the virus by 81.6% in the 2 to 8 months following the drug’s administration. This maintains the drug’s 81.4% risk reduction previously reported during the first month following administration.
During the 8-month assessment period of the Phase III trial, jointly run with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which assessed use of a single dose of investigational REGEN-COV to prevent COVID in uninfected individuals. There were no hospitalisations for COVID in the REGEN-COV group. Meanwhile, there were 6 in the placebo group. There were no deaths due to COVID in any treatment group during the 8-month assessment period, and there were no new safety signals identified for REGEN-COV.
Regeneron stated that researchers were able to demonstrate the impact of its drug even after the immediate risk of household infection had subsided.
“Today’s new data demonstrate how a single dose of REGEN-COV can help protect people from COVID-19 for many months after administration,” said Myron S. Cohen, MD, who leads the monoclonal antibody efforts for the NIH-sponsored COVID Prevention Network (CoVPN) and is the Director of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “These results demonstrate that REGEN-COV has the potential to provide long-lasting immunity from SARS-CoV-2 infection, a result particularly important to those who do not respond to COVID-19 vaccines including people who are immunocompromised.”
REGEN-COV is a cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies that was designed specifically to block infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, using Regeneron’s proprietary VelocImmune® and VelociSuite® technologies.
Ana Ovey
