Trump Got One Covid Antibody Drug, But You Might Get This One
Lilly plans to have 1 million doses available by yearend, far more at first than rival Regeneron’s dual-antibody combo.
A Lilly lab technician tends to cell cultures for coronavirus antibodies.
Photographer: Mark Sommerfeld for Bloomberg BusinessweekIn April, Eli Lilly & Co. Chief Executive Officer David Ricks made a radical decision. He told U.S. regulators the drug giant would shut down production of a colon cancer drug at a New Jersey plant in order to start manufacturing a coronavirus antibody treatment that hadn’t even moved into human testing. “We had no evidence it would work,” Ricks recalls. “It now sounds slightly crazy, but in the middle of the pandemic, it seemed like the right thing to do.”
It was an expensive risk. Or as Ricks put it, just the kind of “unusual maneuver” necessary to bring patients a treatment when they need it most: before a vaccine becomes widely available. Any day, Lilly could find out whether the bet has paid off.