Kimberly Fezerstone became one of the patients who underwent an experimental treatment with a new drug. Doctors, pharmacists and scientists have found a new medicine for patients with severe cases of COVID-19.
This cocktail of antibodies will not save everyone, but it will save many. The new – and rather expensive – drug is a mixture of two types of laboratory-made antibodies that is administered intravenously and helps the body neutralize the virus.
Trials under the British Recovery Trial Covid-19 Drug Search Program have shown that this treatment helps one in three hospitalized patients with severe cases of Covid-19. Experts have calculated that it saves six lives for every hundred patients treated.
The drug, made by the American company Regeneron, is cloned from a single cell and is called a monoclonal antibody and costs about $1400 to $2800. It can only treat those whose bodies have not naturally produced antibodies to fight the coronavirus.
In Great Britain, this medicine was given to a thousand patients as an experiment and it was found that it significantly reduces: “I was very fortunate that these trials were already underway when I was hospitalized with COVID-19, and that I received this drug,” says 37-year-old Kimberley Fezerstone. “And I’m glad that I was able to participate in the trials and help determine that the treatment works.”
Sir Martin Landray, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s leaders, says the new treatment reduces the risk of death in severe patients by about one-fifth. “We have seen that by using antiviral treatment, in this case these antibodies, we reduce the risk for patients who would have a one in three chance of dying without treatment,” said Professor Landry.
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The new drug was used in combination with dexamethasone, an anti-inflammatory steroid. Doctors discovered a year ago that dexamethasone alone reduced the risk of death from COVID-19 by about a third in severe patients.
Another principal investigator, Sir Peter Hornby, also an Oxford professor, says that until now, doctors and scientists have had strong doubts about the effectiveness of antibody treatment. For example, attempts to treat patients by injecting them with plasma containing antibodies from people who had recovered from COVID-19 were unsuccessful. But the new drug, tested in the Recovery Trial Program, contains high doses of engineered antibodies that successfully bind to the coronavirus and prevent it from infecting cells. “It is great to find that such a targeted attack on the virus can reduce mortality in patients who do not produce their own antibodies,” says Sir Peter Hornby.