Study: Antibody drug may have benefit

Encouraging tests show the drug may reduce virus sooner

A drug company says partial results from a study testing an antibody drug hint it may help keep mildly to moderately ill COVID-19 patients from being hospitalized, a goal no current coronavirus medicine has been able to meet.

Eli Lilly announced the results Wednesday, but they have not been published or reviewed by independent scientists.

The drug missed the study’s main goal of reducing the amount of virus in patients after 11 days. However, most study participants, even those given a placebo, had cleared the virus by then, so that time point seems too late to judge that potential benefit, the company said.

Other tests suggest the drug was reducing the virus sooner and the results are an encouraging “proof of principle,” Lilly said.

The company said it would talk with regulators about possible next steps, but that it was too soon to speculate on whether the results might lead to early use.

“I’m strongly encouraged” by the results, said Dr. Myron Cohen, a University of North Carolina virologist. He had no role in the Lilly study but helps direct antibody studies for a publicprivate research group the federal government formed to speed testing of these drugs.

“This seems to demonstrate what we thought” — that such drugs would give a benefit, he said.

Antibodies are proteins the body makes when an infection occurs; they attach to a virus and help it be eliminated. The blood of survivors is being tested as a treatment for COVID-19 patients because it contains such antibodies, but the strength and types of antibodies varies in each donor, and doing this on a large scale is impractical.

The drugs that Lilly and other companies are testing are concentrated versions of specific antibodies that worked best against the coronavirus in lab and animal tests, and can be made in large, standardized doses.