Regeneron says Covid treatment may be ready this autumn

Regeneron is working with the US Food and Drug Administration to accelerate the licensing of additional commercial products manufactured in Limerick.

Biotech company Regeneron is to increase the number of medicines manufactured at its Limerick facility in order to ramp up production of their COVID-19 drug treatment in the US.

Headquartered in New York, Regeneron employs almost 1,000 people in the former Dell factory in Raheen.

The company said it could have large quantities of its experimental antibody treatment for Covid-19 available as soon as this autumn as it increased revenues in the first quarter by 33% to €1.7 billion.

The company is advancing its antibody "cocktail" treatment called REGN-COV2 designed to prevent and treat the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The company said the treatment for Covid-19 could be available as soon as this autumn with plans to scale up its manufacturing to produce 200,000 doses per month by the end of summer. Human trials of the drug will begin next month.

To meet the timeline will “depend on a lot of factors,” including whether the treatment works as well as hoped, “and there is obviously a lot of risk,” Regeneron Chief Scientific Officer George Yancopoulos said.

We’ve sort of done it before but now we are trying to take it to the next level.

Regeneron said that in order to enable its US manufacturing site to produce large-scale quantities of REGN-COV2, they are working with the US Food and Drug Administration to accelerate the licensing of additional commercial products manufactured in Limerick.

Regeneron also has medicines to treat eye disease, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, allergic and inflammatory diseases, infectious and rare diseases, pain, and cancer.

In a partnership with French drug company Sanofi, Regeneron has been running a separate programme evaluating the drug Kevzara in patients hospitalised with severe Covid-19.