In the last
week, investors have largely focused on the government's efforts and ability to
protect the economy from coronavirus pain. But this is a public health
crisis first, and the news there continues to get worse. There are more than
5,800 confirmed cases in the U.S. and 97 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins
data. World-wide, the number of cases has surpassed 196,000, with
nearly 7,900 deaths.
But there was
even some hope on the health front Tuesday. Regeneron said it could start human trials for a Covid-19
treatment by early this summer. Barron's Jack
Hough spoke
with the Regeneron CEO Leonard
Schleifer this morning. The executive offered some of
the most hopeful news I've heard since the virus began its lethal spread. Here
are excerpts from the interview:
On the search for a Covid-19 drug:
You have a three-pronged approach. First, try
to take existing drugs that may have been developed for other purposes and see
if they will work for Covid-19. Second, give people a human antibody that can
fight off infection until there are vaccines around. Third, get a vaccine so
that the body can make these antibodies itself.
On using existing treatments:
You can break them into two broad categories.
People are looking at antivirals. There are drug trials that I’m aware of with
Remdesivir, a Gilead
Sciences drug, which was tried
with Ebola. The idea there is you interfere with the functioning of the virus.
Another thing you can think about is, are there any drugs that can prevent the
virus from wreaking havoc on the body? When the virus gets into the lungs, it
causes this massive inflammation. Maybe, just maybe, if you control the
inflammation, you’ll be able do something to prevent patients from needing a
respirator, and make their fever go away.
That’s our drug, Kevzara. It was discovered at
Regeneron and developed for rheumatoid arthritis with our partner, Sanofi. Its
mechanism of action is that we have these inflammatory mediators in the body
called cytokines, and one of the bad ones is interleukin-6, which causes lots
of inflammation. This may be what’s causing some of the inflammation in the
lungs. In China, as this epidemic started, there was a drug made by Roche
Holding, known as Actemra, which blocks the function
of the interleukin-6 receptor. They had rather impressive, albeit uncontrolled,
data. They treated 21 people, and all of these people did very well. They all
got out of the hospital. A majority improved their ability to breathe, and
their fevers went away. People have also tried this drug in Italy, with
reportedly good results.
There are only two drugs in this class
currently available. One is Roche’s drug, and the other is our drug, Kevzara.
We worked very rapidly to design a trial. We worked closely with the FDA,
collaborated with Barda [Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority],
got help from Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo in New York, and we put in place in record
time a clinical trial to see if in fact this approach, blocking the
inflammation, might be good.
On when a drug might be available:
If the drug is shown to work in hospitalized patients,
we have lots of the drug on hand and can make much more. The best case is that
people wouldn’t progress from let’s say needing a little oxygen to going on a
respirator. If we all get sick at once, it could be a disaster because we won’t
have enough intensive care beds. A drug like this could really slow down the
number of people who needed really intensive respiratory therapy. This could go
fairly quickly. There are unfortunately a lot of people in the hospital. If we
can enroll the study quickly over the next month, you should know within a few
weeks of treating people how they’re doing.
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