Germany will become the first European Union country to start using the same experimental antibodies treatment credited with helping Donald Trump recover from COVID-19, health minister Jens Spahn said Sunday, as was reported by Medicalxpress.
"The government has bought 200,000 doses for 400 million euros ($486 million)," Spahn told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, working out at 2,000 euros per dose. The so-called monoclonal antibody cocktails will be deployed to university hospitals in the coming week, he said, adding that Germany was "the first country in the EU" to use them in the fight against the pandemic.
However, thе name of the manufacturer that will be supplying the drugs has not been disclosed.
"They work like a passive vaccination. Administering these antibodies in the early stages can help high-risk patients avoid a more serious progression," Spahn said.
Trump, who was briefly hospitalized with the coronavirus, was given the antibody treatment developed by US firm Regeneron, known as REGN-COV2, even before the treatment had won regulatory approval. He later said the medicine did "a fantastic job". US company Eli Lilly has developed a similar treatment.
The novel treatment is a combination of a "cocktail" of two lab-made antibodies: infection-fighting proteins that were developed to bind to the part of the new coronavirus that it uses to invade human cells. The antibodies attach themselves to different parts of the virus's spike protein, distorting its structure—similar in a way to knocking a key out of shape so it no longer fits its lock.
Germany's order comes at a time of growing frustration in the EU over a slower-than-expected rollout of vaccines. Vaccine makers Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca have both said they would be delivering fewer doses to Europe than anticipated in the short term because of production problems. The German government has said it nonetheless expects to be able to offer all Germans a jab by the end of August.
As "Apostrophe" reported earlier, a new strain of coronavirus was discovered in Germany, 35 people were already infected