\n
Eli Lilly had been developing bebtelovimab long before the emergence of Omicron as part of its collaboration with the Vaccine Research Center, an arm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It did so out of \u201cfear that there could be a new highly resistant variant,\u201d Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Eli Lilly\u2019s chief scientific officer, said in an interview.<\/p>\n
The company began safety testing of bebtelovimab early last year and then manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses of the drug before knowing whether it would be needed. More recently, the company tested the drug in laboratory experiments that found that it remained highly potent against Omicron.<\/p>\n
Dr. Skovronsky said the urgency of the fast-changing pandemic and strong laboratory data justified bringing the drug to market before testing it in patients with Omicron.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the national strategy is every time there\u2019s a new variant, we need to do clinical trials for that variant, we\u2019ll never have the drugs in time,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll always be one variant behind.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With Covid treatments still in short supply in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration on Friday gave emergency authorization to a new monoclonal antibody drug that has been found in the laboratory to be potent against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The Biden administration said it would make the therapy immediately available […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":79198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3266],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/FDA-Clears-Monoclonal-Antibody-Drug-From-Eli-Lilly.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}