Israel Reports a "Breakthrough" Coronavirus Antibody Treatment
While a vaccine for COVID-19 could be a year or two away at the very least, many market participants have been pinning their hopes on an effective treatment in the meantime. In a best-case scenario, such a treatment could mitigate the worst outcomes in at-risk patients and potentially cure the disease in a majority of patients.
Many have put their hopes on remdesivir, a drug developed by Gilead (NASDAQ: GILD). And while Gilead's initial Chicago trial showed some promising data, it was far from a cure. While patients getting remdesivir took 11 days to leave the hospital versus 15 days for the control group, and the remdesivir group showed an 8% mortality rate versus 11% in the control group, infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci said that, while promising, the data "has not reached statistical significance but the data needs to be further analyzed."
However, investors should know that remdesivir isn't the only game in town. One of the more promising alternatives could be synthetic antibodies derived from recovered patients. Antibodies are proteins created by the body's immune system to fend off threats, such as the coronavirus. In recent days, China reported a breakthrough on such an antibody treatment, but that data was only proven in a test tube, not humans.
Source Fool.com
