Antibody cocktail reduces viral load in COVID 19 patients with high viral load: NEJM

USA: REGN-COV2 antibody cocktail helped in reducing viral load in COVID-19 patients, revealed preliminary findings from a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to the small study, the greater effect was seen in patients who had a higher viral load at baseline or whose immune response has not been initiated yet.

Recent data has suggested high viral loads to be the reason for death and complications from coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Daniel M. Weinreich, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, and colleagues in the study described results of an initial analysis involving 275 symptomatic patients from their ongoing phase 1–3 trial involving outpatients with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The researchers investigated two fully human, neutralizing monoclonal antibodies against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein, used in a combined cocktail (REGN-COV2) for reducing the risk of the emergence of treatment-resistant mutant virus. The patients were randomly assigned in the ratio 1:1 to receive placebo, 2.4 g of REGN-COV2, or 8.0 g of REGN-COV2. They cwere prospectively characterized at baseline for endogenous immune response against SARS-CoV-2 (serum antibody–positive or serum antibody–negative).