The U.S. government plans to purchase 1.25 million additional treatment courses of Regeneron’s investigational monoclonal antibody therapeutic, a combination of casirivimab and imdevimab, to be delivered in the first half of 2021 to treat non-hospitalized, high-risk COVID-19 patients, according to a press release from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The latest agreement brings the total supply of casirivimab and imdevimab purchased by HHS and the Department of Defense to over 1.5 million treatment courses.
Under an agreement announced in July, Regeneron is in the process of delivering the first approximately 300,000 doses of casirivimab and imdevimab. Following emergency use authorization (EUA) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), HHS began allocating these doses November 23 to state and territorial health departments which, in turn, direct which healthcare facilities receive the infusion drug.
These government-purchased doses are available at no cost to patients, although healthcare facilities could charge for administering the medicine – as is customary with such government-purchased products.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, provided approximately $2.63 billion to purchase the additional treatment courses, working in collaboration with the DOD Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND) and the Army Contracting Command.
Regeneron developed the treatment, a combination of two monoclonal antibodies called casirivimab and imdevimab, with preclinical and clinical development funded in part through a long-standing partnership with BARDA. Regeneron previously used its same proprietary technology to develop a novel triple monoclonal antibody treatment for Ebola, which in 2020 became the first FDA-approved treatment for Zaire ebolavirus.
