Eli Lilly and Company said it has begun the first human trial of antibody therapy to treat the novel pandemic. According to the company, if the trial is fruitful, the therapy could be available by the fall.
The company said that the first patients to benefit from the therapy are in hospitals at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, and Emory University in Atlanta. Their results are expected to be available by the end of the current month.
The antibody therapy is a result of the partnership between AbCellera, a Canada-based biotech company, and the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Scientists at AbCellera and NIAID used a blood sample from one of the first US patients to recover from COVID-19 and divided it into millions of cells to find hundreds of antibodies. Antibodies are proteins your body makes to fight infection. The scientists chose the antibodies they thought would best neutralize the coronavirus.
Lilly said that in the lab, the antibody appeared to neutralize the virus. Those results have not yet been published.
Dr. Dan Skovronsky, Eli Lilly’s senior vice president and the chief scientific officer said that they already started the manufacturing process to really scale this up without being sure that it works for patients because if it does work, the doctor said that the company is not willing to waste time, adding that the team wants to have as much medicine as possible available to help as many people quickly.
