6. How many monoclonal antibodies for Covid-19 are in development?
Since the start of the pandemic researchers have been rapidly evaluating existing drugs and developing new treatments – including monoclonal antibodies – to treat Covid-19 patients.
Several monoclonal antibodies that are licensed or in development for other diseases are in clinical trials to see if they have an effect on Covid-19 patients. One of these is adalimumab, used to treat arthritis and Crohn's disease; the University of Oxford recently launched a trial to look at its potential to treat people in care homes, funded by the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.
Researchers have also been rapidly identifying monoclonal antibodies that specifically target SARS-CoV-2. More than 70 such products are already in development.
The pharmaceutical company Lilly, in collaboration with AbCellera, launched the first human study of a potential Covid-19 antibody treatment in May-June this year. Other safety clinical trials followed, including studies by AstraZeneca, Celltrion and Regeneron.
7. When will Covid-19 monoclonal antibodies be available, and who will get them?
The speed of research into Covid-19 treatments has been unprecedented.
One of the advantages of monoclonal antibodies is that clinical trials can happen even more rapidly; because these are based on natural antibodies, not chemical compounds, safety trials take less time.
In less than four months since the start of their clinical trials for Covid-19 antibody-products, Lilly and Regeneron published early results showing encouraging signs. Results from other clinical studies are expected later this autumn.
Knowing if any of these antibody treatments are safe and effective for treating or preventing Covid-19 is only the first step.
Making them available to patients will depend on many other things, such as manufacturing capacity – how quickly large quantities of the effective treatment can be made. It will also depend on price – who will be able to afford to buy them.
The ACT-Accelerator is a ground breaking collaboration created for exactly this purpose – to make sure that any Covid-19 treatments, vaccines and tests will be accessible to those who need them most, across the world, not only in the countries that can afford to pay the highest costs.
8. Are monoclonal antibodies expensive?
Monoclonal antibodies are more complex and expensive to produce than other types of drugs. This makes them some of the most expensive drugs in the world, unaffordable for most of the world’s population.
The median price for monoclonal antibody treatments in the US ranges from $15,000 to $200,000 a year. Although drug prices vary greatly worldwide, companies that market many of these treatments focus primarily on high-income countries, where prices are the highest.
As a result, almost 80 per cent of monoclonal antibodies are sold in the US, Canada and Europe. That could change.
Biosimilar products are one way to reduce production costs and make these innovative treatments cheaper. Once the original monoclonal antibody product is off patent, companies can create similar, but cheaper products. An example is Canmab – a biosimilar version of the breast cancer drug Herceptin – which sells for $100–$200 per dose in India. This is significantly less than the $1,800 price per dose in the US.
Another way companies can make monoclonal antibodies cheaper is by introducing second brands which can only be sold in low- and middle-income countries. One example is Herclon, another brand that Herceptin is sold as.