Sunday, June 07, 2020

First Human Trial for COVID-19 Antibody Drug Begins

Amazing stuff! Wow! The speed and the collaborative effort of this development is breathtaking! Going forward one can assume drug development will be permanently accelerated!



"Just three months after the start of the pandemic, drugmaker Eli Lilly [plus AbCellera, and the Vaccine Research Center at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] has announced the first human test of an antibody treatment designed to fight the novel coronavirus. ... In 2018, AbCellera joined DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program to develop technologies to deliver rapid medical countermeasures to emerging pandemics."



"On 25 February, the company received the recovered COVID-19 patient’s blood sample. ... Within three days, AbCellera had over 2,000 positive hits: antibodies that demonstrated some binding to the virus. ... At that point, the company handed off the antibodies to partner Eli Lilly, a drug company with experience in running clinical trials and manufacturing new drugs. AbCellera and Lilly narrowed the candidates to a set of 190 antibodies, which they sent to the Vaccine Research Center for potency testing against the virus in cells and animals. By mid-April, the group had narrowed them down to 24 front-runners. ... On 1 June, Eli Lilly announced that it had begun dosing patients with one of those finalists, LY-CoV555, for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19."



First Human Trial for COVID-19 Antibody Drug Begins - IEEE Spectrum The antibody was discovered in a recovered patient’s blood using microfluidics, machine vision, and big-data tools

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