HealthDay News – A third antibody treatment designed to prevent high-risk COVID-19 patients from being hospitalized was emergency approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday.
It is important that the newly approved drug called sotrovimab neutralized the highly infectious virus variant that paralyzes India in laboratory tests, as well as variants that were first discovered in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, California and New York.
“With the approval of this monoclonal antibody treatment, we are offering another option to keep high-risk patients with COVID-19 out of the hospital,” said Patrizia Cavazzoni, MD, director of the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research in an agency press release. “It is important to expand the arsenal of monoclonal antibody therapies that are expected to maintain activity against the circulating variants of COVID-19 in the United States.”
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The drug, developed by GlaxoSmithKline in collaboration with the American company Vir Biotechnology, should be available to Americans “in the coming weeks,” the company said in a statement. “Sotrovimab is an important new treatment option in the fight against the current pandemic and potentially future coronavirus outbreaks,” said George Scangos, Ph.D., CEO of Vir.
Treatment for GSK and Vir is a single drug that mimics the antibodies that are produced by the immune system’s defense against coronavirus. The emergency approval was based on a study of 583 volunteers who had experienced symptoms within the previous five days. The study showed that those who received GSK-Vir treatment had reduced their risk of hospitalization or death by 85 percent compared to those who received a placebo.
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COVID19 Vaccine General Infectious Diseases General Neurology
