Switzerland’s Roche announced today that clinical trials of a cocktail of drugs for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), developed with Regeneron, have shown a reduction in the risk of severe disease by up to 70%.
AFP reports that Roche issued a statement saying that the phase 3 clinical trial showed that a cocktail of antibodies combining casirivimab and imdevimab helped “reduce the risk of hospitalization or death for up to 70% of patients with ambulatory infections”.
The cocktail also significantly reduced the number of days of symptoms, from 14 days to 10 days, the statement said.
The clinical trial was conducted on patients believed to be at high risk of severe infection, generally the elderly and those with serious underlying diseases, Roche said.
Several pharmaceutical companies are developing antibody therapies that prevent the virus from being copied in the body, with the goal of finding effective treatments, plus vaccines to combat mutant strains of the virus.
Roche notes that this is the only combination of two monoclonal antibody cocktails that remain effective against the major mutant strains.
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