Meredith WadmanScience's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.Today brings the first whisper of success for a class of closely watched drugs that it’s hoped will begin to beat back COVID-19 before vaccines are licensed: monoclonal antibodies, engineered versions of the same virus-fighting antibodies that the body naturally produces.Eli Lilly reports this morning interim results from a placebo-controlled trial of one such compound, cloned in quantity from an antibody captured from the blood of a patient who recovered from COVID-19.
In June, the company began a trial delivering either placebo or one of three doses of the antibody, called LY-CoV555, to 452 patients.