It might reassure people who cannot get vaccinated… Regeneron announced their antibody cocktail Regen-Cov could cut up to 80% the risk of severe disease, generally leading to hospitalization. This effectiveness could last for eight months, according to the laboratory’s latest data that just released results of their study as for their product’s effectiveness duration.
What was this study about? It has been conducted in over 1,600 volunteers. Half of them have been given the therapy, the other half, a placebo. Between two and eight months after the injection, only seven cases have been reported in the group given the therapy, against 38 for the placebo group. In the first group as well, no candidate has been hospitalized, but six have been in the second group. Results “particularly important to those who do not respond to COVID-19 vaccines”, said Myron S. Cohen scientist ta the University of North Carolina.
“A single dose of REGEN-COV provided long-term protection against COVID-19, including times of particularly high risk from household exposure, and in the longer-term during ongoing broader exposure”, adds George Yancopoulos, President and Chief Scientific Officer at Regeneron. This therapy under rolling review, a cocktail of monoclonal antibody has been given to Donald Trump when the U.S. President was hospitalized in early October 2020, when infected with Covid.
After this life-size test on the American President, Regeneron sought conditional approval to the FDA – the Food and Drug Adminstration – to be diffused on a great scale and given to patients suffering from light or mild coronavirus. Clinical trials have been unexpectedly halted and justified with a “potential safety signal and an unfavorable risk/benefit profile”.
Note that for a clinical trial to be halted, there must be a risk for the patient or the trial is somehow jeopardized, for instance, when a participant falls sick, just to check the disease is no side effect or not. Regeneron’s clinical trial is not the only one to have been halted: for instance, laboratory AstraZeneca’s and Johnson & Johnson’s – that resumed since then. Another trial about synthetic antibodies, conducted by Eli Lilly, has been halted for several weeks as well, as reminded by our Canadian peers from La Presse.
