German antibodies in demand in USA

Initially, Seattle-based Just – Evotec Biologics will receive US$28.6m from the Defense Health Agency ("DHA") under a partnership announced earlier this summer. Under the terms of the agreement, production will take place on an as-needed basis over the next seven years at a flexible J.POD^® manufacturing facility in Redmonton, USA, which currently is in the process of being completed.  However, a highly efficient process for manufacturing has already been developed.

Just – Evotec Biologics has significant expertise in molecular optimisation, process and product development, which will become increasingly important following the emergence of rapidly replicating viral mutants.

One of the two antibody therapies Casirivimab/Imdevimab (REGN-Cov, Regeneron) und (Bamlanivimab, Lilly) COV-Ly555 ordered by German Health Minister Jens Spahn for €400m in mid-January from the US companies Regeneron and Eli Lilly is likely to be ineffective against the recently emerged South African variant. This was admitted by Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference and on the CNBC television channel following corresponding scientific preprint publications by Moore et al prior to Spahn’s order.

According to Dr Craig Johnstone, Evotec’s Chief Operating Officer, the company also intends to counter future pandemics with an expanded kit of novel therapeutic antibodies. According to the company, it took only six months to select the antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and develop a GMP-compliant manufacturing process – 12 to 18 months is considered fast. Other ultra-fast German antibody developers are currently assessing if efficacy of their candidate are affected by the mutations in the receptor-binding domain of the South-African variant. However, currently they can only do with pseudoviruses that contain the RNA genome of SARS-CoV-2 as nobody has been so far able to provide an isolate of the South African mutant variant.