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April 13, 2021 – People living with someone with COVID-19 appear to benefit from powerful protection against infection when given the Regeneron antibody cocktail, according to a new study.
The results suggest that beyond prevention the worst outcomes coronavirus When administered early enough, the cocktail could also prevent people from getting sick, the company said on Monday.
“As more than 60,000 Americans continue to be diagnosed with COVID-19 every day, the REGEN-COV antibody cocktail can help provide immediate protection to unvaccinated people who are exposed to the virus, and we are also working to understand its potential to provide protection for immunocompromised patients who may not respond well vaccines“Said Dr. George Yancopoulos, President and Scientific Director of Regeneron, in a statement.
In its statement, Regeneron said it will ask the United States Food and Drug Administration to expand the use of the drug’s emergency clearance – for high-risk people who already have COVID-19. but who are not hospitalized – to allow it to be administered for preventive purposes. in “appropriate populations”.
There are “a very large number of people” in the United States and around the world who might be a good candidate to receive these drugs for preventive purposes, said Dr. Myron Cohen, a University of Carolina researcher. North at the New York Times. He is leading monoclonal antibody efforts for the Covid Prevention Network, an initiative sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health that helped oversee the Regeneron trial.
“Not everyone is going to take a vaccine, whatever we do, and not everyone will respond to a vaccine, ”Cohen noted.
The new data on the Regeneron antibody cocktail comes from a clinical test which recruited more than 1,500 people who lived in the same house as someone who had tested positive for the virus in the previous four days. Those who received an injection of the drug Regeneron were 81% less likely to get sick with COVID-19 than volunteers who had a placebo, the company said.
Dr Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the study, told The Times the data was “promising” for people who were not vaccinated. But he noted that the type of patients who would be needed to determine whether the drug should be used preventively for immunocompromised patients were not included in the trial. “I would say we don’t know that yet,” Gandhi said.
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The Regeneron cocktail, a combination of two drugs designed to mimic the antibodies generated naturally when the immune system repels the virus, was given to President Donald Trump after he fell ill with COVID-19 last fall.
The treatment received emergency authorization last November. Doctors use it, along with another cocktail of Eli Lilly’s antibodies, for patients at high risk of COVID-19, to guard against serious illness and hospitalization.
But many hospitals and clinics have not made treatments a priority because they are time consuming and difficult to administer, mainly because they have to be administered intravenously. Regeneron plans to ask the FDA to allow its drug to be given by injection, as was the case in the last study, which would allow it to be administered faster and easier.
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