Eli Lilly and Co could have a drug specifically designed to treat COVID-19 authorized for use as early as September if all goes well with either of two antibody therapies it is testing, its chief scientist told Reuters on Wednesday.
FILE PHOTO: The logo and ticker for Eli Lilly and Co. are displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, U.S., May 18, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
“For the treatment indication, particularly, this could go pretty fast,” he said in an interview. “If in August or September we’re seeing the people who got treated are not progressing to hospitalization, that would be powerful data and could lead to emergency use authorization.”Coronavirus vaccines being developed and tested at unprecedented speed are not likely to be ready before the end of the year at the earliest.
Lilly’s third antibody treatment candidate acts on a different part of the virus and will most likely be tested in combination with one or both of the others, Skovronsky said. Lilly will have the capacity to make hundreds of thousands of doses by the end of the year if it can treat COVID-19 patients using a single antibody drug rather than with a combination, he said.
The better solution is to widely inoculate people with COVID-19 vaccines when available, and reserve antibody treatments for people who have the disease or were recently exposed to it.
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