Eli Lilly announced Monday it initiated human trials for a possible new coronavirus treatment using a blood sample from one of the first patients in the United States to recover from the disease.
“Antibody treatments like the one being studied here hold promise to be effective medical countermeasures against this deadly infection,” said Dr. Mark Mulligan, the director of the vaccine center at New York University Langone Health, who is one of the doctors working in the study with Eli Lilly.
The Indianapolis-based drugmaker began the first phase of the study of a human-manufactured antibody treatment developed using blood samples from one of the first people in the U.S. confirmed to have recovered from the coronavirus. Unlike possible therapies such as remdesivir, which have been repurposed as coronavirus treatments, the antibody therapy was newly developed specifically to treat the coronavirus.
The first phase of Eli Lilly’s study, which aims to determine whether the treatment is safe for people and will be administered to about 30 people, is part of a larger push to harness the power of antibodies created by the body’s own immune system to fight off disease.
If Eli Lilly finds that doses of the antibody therapy can be administered to hospitalized COVID-19 virus patients without creating harmful side effects, the company will move on to phase two, in which nonhospitalized patients will receive the therapy.
“Later this month, we will review the results of this first human study and intend to initiate broader efficacy trials. At the same time as we are investigating safety and efficacy, we also are starting large-scale manufacturing of this potential therapy,” said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Eli Lilly’s chief scientific officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories.
The company said it will also conduct studies as to whether the treatment can prevent sickness, focusing on patients who are not “optimal candidates” for vaccines.
