The federal government has agreed to purchase 100,000 doses of a recently authorized treatment for Covid-19 from Eli Lilly, increasing the supply of such drugs to patients at high risk of becoming seriously ill but not yet hospitalized.
Under the agreement, announced on Friday, the government will pay $ 210 million and Eli Lilly will dispatch the doses by the end of March. The government has the option to purchase an additional 1.1 million doses of treatment by November, but how many of those doses will be ordered will depend in part on the course of the pandemic in the United States.
The treatment is a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies that combines the drug Eli Lilly known as bamlanivimab – which was authorized last November and is in use in high-risk patients with Covid-19 – with a second drug known as etesevimab. The combination received emergency clearance earlier this month from the Food and Drug Administration. Both drugs consist of artificial copies of antibodies that are naturally generated when a person’s immune system fights an infection.
The United States government previously agreed to buy about 1.5 million doses of bamlanivimab. Eli Lilly has already delivered more than 1 million doses, with the rest to be delivered by the end of March. More than 660,000 doses of bamlanivimab have been sent to states and other jurisdictions.
Eli Lilly’s new combination therapy may offer an advantage over bamlanivimab alone if worrying variants of the coronavirus – particularly B.1.351, the first identified in South Africa – take off in the United States. Although bamlanivimab alone was considered in a laboratory study to be impotent against variant B.1.351, preliminary data suggest that combination therapy may be better able to combat variants. That’s because so-called escape mutations in variants that may allow them to avoid one antibody may not work against the second.
Another cocktail of monoclonal antibodies, from Regeneron, is also authorized in the United States. Almost 100,000 doses of this therapy have been shipped.
Antibody treatments had an advertising boost last fall when they were given to Donald J. Trump, when he became infected in the last months of his presidency, and to other prominent Republicans, but were surprisingly underutilized in many places in the first few months of availability. Overburdened hospitals do not prioritize treatments, which are complicated and must be administered through intravenous infusions. Many patients and doctors did not know how to ask for them or how to find them.
In December, the first federal government data collected in hospitals suggested that they had given only about 20% of their supply to patients. But that image is changing. Eli Lilly saw the use of bamlanivimab alone increase to around 40 percent across the country, with much greater absorption in some places, said Janelle Sabo, who leads Eli Lilly’s work on Covid-19 antibodies, in an interview earlier this week.