Laboratory-made antibodies are a best bet for a coronavirus treatment, but there won’t be enough

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Wed, 2020-09-30 16:53 — mike kraft

These laboratory-made antibodies are a best bet for a coronavirus treatment, but there won’t be enough Experts have big hopes for these specialized drugs created by living cells. But they are expensive and hard to scale up, so even success will have limited impact on the virus. Carolyn Y. Johnson Washington Post

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Current treatments for the coronavirus aim to help the sickest patients survive. But this drug, called a monoclonal antibody cocktail, aims to keep people out of the hospital altogether. The experimental shot of lab-generated antibodies imitates the body’s own disease-fighting force. The goal is to boost a person’s immune defense, instead of waiting for human biology to muster its own response — and possibly lose to the virus.

Predictions about coronavirus vaccines have become almost deafening in recent weeks, but whether the first doses of a vaccine arrive this year or not, some people will continue to get sick. A medication that could prevent people from progressing to the point that they need a hospital bed or ventilator could be a bridge to a vaccine, or it could be the lifeline that could give people confidence to return to normal life even once vaccines are developed.

In the search for such a countermeasure, monoclonal antibodies, a Nobel Prize-winning biotechnology invented in the 1970s, have become the first line of attack, pursued by at least 50 companies and academic teams. That includes the two-antibody cocktail churned out by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’s hamster cells in Rensselaer, N.Y.

Promising but preliminary data has bolstered the chorus of hope around monoclonals from top health officials.

They are “a real best chance of being a game changer,” according to Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

“We’re looking for big impacts on disease, not the small incremental impacts we often see in ordinary drug development,” said Janet Woodcock, who is leading therapeutics development for Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s initiative to provide treatments and vaccines for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. ...

To create enough antibody medication to treat all the people diagnosed with covid-19 so far, the entire global capacity for making monoclonals would have to be switched over for a year, according to an analysis conducted for The Washington Post, by the BioProcess Technology Group at global accounting firm BDO, which advises the pharmaceutical industry. Now, the reactors that make monoclonal antibodies are mostly occupied, making essential drugs for people with cancer and autoimmune diseases. ...

Also see: New data from Regenerons

https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/29/regenerons-covid-19-antibody-may-help-non-hospitalized-patients-recover-faster-early-data-show/

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