AstraZeneca Plc’s Covid-19 antibody drug likely won’t work against an ascendant new variant, the US Food and Drug Administration said Friday, leaving high-risk people with fewer protections as mutations mount.
(Bloomberg) — AstraZeneca Plc’s Covid-19 antibody drug likely won’t work against an ascendant new variant, the US Food and Drug Administration said Friday, leaving high-risk people with fewer protections as mutations mount.
The variant, known as XBB.1.5, is the latest to wallop the US and now accounts for more than a quarter of US Covid cases. AstraZeneca’s antibody drug, Evusheld, was the last of its kind still authorized to prevent infections in high-risk people.
Antibody therapies have been essential for treating and preventing disease in roughly 7 million immunocompromised Americans for whom vaccines and antivirals can be less effective. But Covid has continued to mutate, knocking antibody drugs off the market one-by-one.
Read more: Covid’s Mutations Leave Few Antibody Drugs to Treat Virus (1)
In November, the FDA revoked an emergency use authorization for Eli Lilly & Co.’s antibody treatment because it wasn’t likely to work against the variants that were circulating.
Drugs made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and the partnership of GSK Plc and Vir Biotechnology Inc. were thwarted by earlier mutations. Scientists have been warning that Evusheld could be next.
In December, the US National Institutes of Health’s Covid-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel recommended against using any monoclonal antibody drugs to treat or prevent Covid in high-risk people. The panel said that even though Evusheld was still authorized, it wasn’t expected to work against omicron variants that were dominant in the US.
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