Trump's Covid treatment thrusts Limerick's Regeneron to centre stage

The company's experimental Covid treatment was administered to the President.

Regeneron, headquartered in New Yor with a major operations centre is Limerick, has begun human trials of a new antibody cocktail for Covid-19. Picture: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has found itself in the spotlight after President Donald Trump was treated with the company’s experimental antibody treatment for Covid-19, just days after the unveiling of promising preliminary trial results.

The biopharmaceutical company has a major operations facility in Limerick and is currently adding more than 400 jobs there in order to maximise capacity at its New York facility to produce large quantities of their Covid treatment.

At the recent announcement of 400 new jobs at the Regeneron in Raheen, Limerick, were; Niall O’Leary, Vice President and Site Head, Regeneron; Tánaiste Leo Varadkar TD; An Taoiseach Micheál Martin TD; and Mary Buckley, Executive Director IDA. Picture: Cathal Noonan

The New York-headquartered company said it had provided a single high dose of the drug for Trump after receiving a compassionate-use request from his doctors. Trump is at higher risk of severe Covid-19 complications due to his age and clinical obesity.

Last month Regeneron moved to phase three of its Covid treatment trials testing its REGN-COV2 drugs cocktail which 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 year.

Trump may be an ideal person to benefit from the experimental therapy, which is an artificial version of the antibodies the immune system naturally makes to fight off infection. Since Trump was diagnosed so quickly, the treatment could help jump-start his fight against the pathogen.

Regeneron’s cocktail therapy is a mix of two highly potent antibodies against the coronavirus spike protein. It is being tested in several clinical trials in both hospitalized Covid-19 patients and patients outside the hospital.

The preliminary results from one trial released this week showed the drug may help treat coronavirus patients outside of the hospital by reducing virus levels and symptoms. In a trial of 275 Covid-19 patients, those who got Regeneron’s experimental therapy had lower virus levels in the bloodstream seven days later compared with patients who received a placebo.

Additional reporting Bloomberg