WHO has supported COVID-19 treatment with drug cocktail

The World Health Organization has recommended the combined use of drugs casirivimab and imdevimab, who use monoclonal antibodies, to treat some cases of COVID-19.

“This is a breakthrough in the care of patients with COVID-19“said Janet Díaz, head of clinical care at the United Nations agency.

This antibody therapy has been approved by emergency use in the United States in November of last year, after being used to treat former President Donald Trump. Treatment can cost thousands of dollars if not covered by insurance.

According to the UN agency, intervention with these drugs should be reserved for patients with mild or moderate symptoms, but at high risk of being hospitalized for have a co-morbidity, or for seriously ill patients whose immune system does not produce antibodies.

“Although casirivimab and imdevimab provide a substantial reduction in the relative risk of hospitalization, the benefit will be insignificant or unimportant in absolute terms for all cases at risk except the highest, for which the intervention must be booked», Specifies the guide to therapeutic recommendations of the World Health Organization.

He adds that the panel that studied drug use identified that the threshold at which most people would like to receive treatment is “a greater than 10% risk of being hospitalized for COVID-19.”

But in the absence of credible tools to predict the risk of hospitalization in people infected with COVID-19, the guide notes that those most at risk are those who are not vaccinated, the elderly, or those who have immunodeficiencies or chronic illnesses, such as diabetes.

Negotiations to lower your price

The Swiss Pharmacy rock worked in partnership with Regeneron, who owns the patent, to produce the treatment.

UNITAID, a United Nations health agency, is negotiating directly with Roche to get lower prices and equitable distribution around the world.

WHO has also had discussions with the company to drug donation and distribution through UNICEF.

The WHO recommendations were largely based on data from a UK study in June of 9,000 patients, which found that the therapy reduced the number of deaths in hospitalized patients whose immune systems failed. managed to generate a response.

“We take the information (from the UK study) and generalize it to other people,” Dr Diaz said. “We saw that there was an advantage that we considered important.”

The treatment has been on the market for decades to treat many other diseases, including cancers. It is based on a class of drugs called monoclonal antibodies which mimic the natural antibodies produced by the human body to fight infection.