“It’s a bridge, ultimately, to the vaccine … something that we can do in the short term,” Yancopoulos said. “We can maybe do it actually more powerfully than a vaccine can do it, though for a smaller targeted population than a vaccine can reach.”
He said Regeneron is working with the FDA to repurpose its upstate New York manufacturing facility to become totally dedicated to producing drugs for the pandemic. It could make “hundreds of thousands, if not on the order of a million doses a month” of the antibody cocktail there.
Other companies have approached Regeneron about helping produce massive quantities of the antibody therapy should it prove effective in preventing COVID-19, Yancopoulos said.
“If these things work, let’s make sure we can put as much manufacturing capacity as we can on it right now,” he said.
