Regeneron’s antibody drug is the first specifically-designed COVID-19 treatment added to leading U.K. trial
by Jack Denton
The National Institutes of Health/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
U.S. biotech company Regeneron’s REGN, +3.57% experimental drug is being added to one of the world’s leading coronavirus treatment trials.
Called REGN-COV2, it is the first specifically-designed COVID-19 therapy being tested by the Recovery trial at the University of Oxford.
The drug will be used on people hospitalized with the coronavirus, and will compare adding REGN-COV2 to the usual standard-of-care against the usual standard-of-care alone.
The Recovery trial is one of the world’s largest randomized clinical trials of potential COVID-19 treatments, and has been testing a range of potential treatments since April.
In June, the trial found there was no clinical benefit from the use of hydroxychloroquine — a drug once touted by U.S. President Donald Trump — in treating hospitalized patients with COVID-19.
Regeneron announced in July that REGN-COV2 was entering late-stage, Phase 3 trials in the U.S. evaluating the drug’s effectiveness in preventing infection among uninfected people who have had close exposure to a COVID-19 patient. It is also in Phase 2/Phase 3 clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19.
Studies of the drug’s effects in nonhuman primates have shown that REGN-COV2 reduced the amount of virus and associated damage in the lungs.
“The Recovery trial was specifically designed so that when promising investigational drugs such as REGN-COV2 became available they can be tested quickly,” said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health at the University of Oxford and the chief investigator of the trial.
“We are looking forward to seeing whether REGN-COV2 is safe and effective in the context of a large-scale randomized clinical trial; this is the only way to be certain about whether it works as a treatment for COVID-19,” Horby said.
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REGN-COV2 is an investigational anti-viral antibody cocktail that aims to block the effectiveness of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19. The drug is made up of a combination of a Regeneron-made antibody and an antibody isolated from people who have recovered from the coronavirus. Antibodies are blood proteins produced in response to foreign substances like viruses, and are used by the immune system to fight them off.