Regeneron moves to phase three of Covid treatment trials

Company hiring 400 staff in Limerick to increase capacity

Niall O’Leary, Site Head at Regeneron; Tánaiste Leo Varadkar; An Taoiseach Micheál Martin; and Mary Buckley Executive Director IDA at the recent jobs announcement. Picture: Cathal Noonan

Researchers will start testing an antibody cocktail developed by Regeneron in a key trial of possible Covid-19 treatments.

The biopharmaceutical company is adding more than 400 new jobs to its industrial operations facility in Limerick in order to maximise capacity at its New York facility to produce large quantities of the Covid treatment.

Regeneron's REGN-COV2 drugs cocktail will be given to hospitalised patients in the UK in a trial conducted by the University of Oxford where it will be assessed for all-cause mortality against those receiving the usual standard of care. The researchers will also look at the length of hospital stay and need for ventilation. At least 2,000 people are expected to receive the cocktail.

Regeneron has signed a $450m (€395m) contract with the US government to produce thousands of doses of the drug to treat and prevent infection from Covid-19.

This is despite the fact that the drug has yet to complete clinical trials.

If the trials confirm the effectiveness of the REGN-COV2, Regeneron aims to have hundreds of thousands of treatment doses ready for distribution this autumn.

Regeneron has said that to enable its US manufacturing site to produce large-scale quantities of REGN-COV2, they have licensed some additional products to be manufactured at their Limerick facility.

Last month the company announced plans for the rapid recruitment of 400 new staff in Limerick to bring worker numbers above 1,400 based at the former Dell facility in Raheen.

Regeneron Executive vice President Dan Van Plew said that when the pandemic hit, they needed to quickly change how and where they make their products. "In order to make space in our New York facilities to accommodate our Covid-19 efforts, we needed to ramp-up capacity here in Limerick. Despite ramping up commercial production sooner than planned, my team hasn’t missed a beat. You can only perform like this if you have good people, and Ireland has lots of good people, so we are excited to be hiring 400 more.”

The Regeneron drug is also being tested in three other Covid-19 trials, two as a treatment and one for the prevention of the disease spreading to household contacts of infected individuals. A monoclonal antibody made by Regeneron was also the most successful drug for treating the Ebola virus.

Monoclonal antibodies “are very promising drugs,” Peter Horby, who is leading the trial, said in an interview. “They clearly can have an impact in acute, severe viral diseases, so we’re quite excited about that.”