One of the experimental drugs that US President Donald Trump received while he was battling covid-19, has been approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration.
The drug, made by the biotech company Regeneron, is the second antibody treatment to win emergency use approval from the FDA.
The treatment combines two antibodies — casirivimab and imdevimab — and administers them together by IV. In a clinical trial of about 800 people, the combination was shown to significantly reduce virus levels within days of treatment.
Regeneron's drug, called REGEN-COV2, "is designed to mimic what a well-functioning immune system does by using very potent antibodies to neutralize the virus," Regeneron's chief scientific officer, Dr. George Yancopoulos, said in a statement. "We are encouraged that no variants resistant to the cocktail were identified in the clinical trial analyses to date."
Initial doses of REGEN-COV2 will be made available to approximately 300,000 patients, with no medication out-of-pocket costs, under U.S. government allocation program.
George D. Yancopoulos, Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron Pharmaceutical, is the Greek American biomedical scientist behind Donald Trump’s COVID-19 antibody cocktail.
Yancopoulos, the son of Greek immigrants and a life-long New Yorker, attended New York City public schools and graduated as valedictorian of the Bronx High School of Science, where he was a top winner of the nation's premier high school science competition, then known as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
