Treatment with monoclonal antibodies significantly reduces risk of hospitalization and death after COVID-19 diagnosis

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center conducted a hypothetical pragmatic randomized trial of 2,571 patients treated with monoclonal antibodies matched with data from 5,135 patients with COVID-19 who were eligible for monoclonal antibodies but did not receive them. The authors found that treatment with monoclonal antibodies within two days of COVID-19 infection was associated with an estimated 39 percent lower risk for hospitalization or death at 28 days.

According to the authors, their results indicate that throughout the pandemic, early treatment with monoclonal antibody treatment significantly reduced the severity of COVID-19. They also emphasize that their findings should be interpreted with the knowledge that there are currently no FDA-approved monoclonal antibody treatments for the treatment of outpatients with COVID-19 and that the rapid evolution of new variants warrants timely, continuous evaluation of both monoclonal antibody and non-monoclonal antibody treatment approaches.

Reference:

Kevin E. Kip, Erin K. McCreary, Kevin Collins, Tami E. Minnier, Graham M. Snyder, William Garrard, Jeffrey C. McKibben, Donald M. Yealy, Christopher W. Seymour, David T. Huang, J. Ryan Bariola, Mark Schmidhofer, Richard J. Wadas, Derek C. Angus, Paula L. Kip, and Oscar C. Marroquin, https://doi.org/10.7326/M22-1286