SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Therapy Delivered Strong Protection Against Severe COVID-19

Researchers in New York recently announced Original Research that found two antibodies against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 strongly protected high-risk people with early COVID-19 symptoms from hospitalization and death.

This Research appeared on April 18, 2023, in the Annals of Internal Medicine and enrolled more than 800 non-hospitalized patients with COVID-19 at high risk of progression.

Those randomly assigned to be treated with the combination of the antibodies, amubarvimab, and romlusevimab, had only a 2.3% rate of progression to hospitalization and/or death, compared to 10.7% in the placebo group.

“This was a randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial—the gold standard as we call it—that was conducted as a large international collaboration amid a global pandemic and demonstrated strong effectiveness and safety for this treatment,” commented the study co-first author Dr. Teresa Evering, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine and an infectious disease specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

The study, part of the ACTIV-2 Study of Outpatient Monoclonal Antibodies and Other Therapies, was also co-led by researchers at the University of California-San Diego, The Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and the Lundquist Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. 

ACTIV-2 is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, and is part of NIH’s Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines public-private partnership.

The study population was mostly unvaccinated against COVID-19 and enrolled before the spread of Omicron variants and subvariants.

Coronavirus Today publishes COVID-19 antibody news.