Germany Buys Same Corona Meds Used To Treat Trump

Frankfurt am Main, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Jan, 2021 ) :Germany will become the first European Union country to start using the same experimental antibodies treatment credited with helping Donald Trump recover from Covid-19, health minister Jens Spahn said Sunday.

"The government has bought 200,000 doses for 400 million Euros ($486 million)," Spahn told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, working out at 2,000 euros per dose.

Patients will receive them free of charge, a health ministry spokeswoman told AFP.

Two different kinds of so-called monoclonal antibody therapies will be made available to university hospitals from the coming week, with Spahn saying Germany was "the first country in the EU" to deploy them in the fight against the pandemic.

Both treatments have been approved for emergency use in the United States but have yet to receive the green light from European regulators.

The ministry spokeswoman said Germany's national regulator, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PIE), had determined that use of the drugs was "in principle" allowed on a case-by-case basis, decided by doctors, to prevent "severe illness or hospitalisations among certain risk groups".

Germany has purchased doses of US firm Regeneron's Casirivimab/Imdevimab antibody cocktail, as well US company Eli Lilly's Bamlanivimab antibody drug, she added.

Trump, who was briefly hospitalised with the coronavirus last October while he was US president, was treated with Regeneron's therapy before it had gained formal authorisation.

He later said the medicine did "a fantastic job".

Regeneron's version is a combination or "cocktail" of two lab-made antibodies: infection-fighting proteins that were developed to bind to the surface protein of the coronavirus to stop it from invading human cells.

Eli Lilly's therapy works in a similar way but uses a single synthetic antibody.