Last month, the European Commission committed to identify the five “most promising” Covid-19 therapies by the end of June (see EUROPE 12714/11) in order to best support their development. On Tuesday 29 June, it announced the names of these five solutions.
One of them, baricitinib, is an immunosuppressant distributed by the American company Eli Lilly. It is already on the market, but the company will need to obtain additional market authorisation so that its use can be extended to patients with Covid-19.
The remaining four solutions are newly-developed monoclonal antibodies. These are: - another Eli Lilly treatment candidate, combining the antibodies bamlanivimab and etesevimab; - REGN-COV2, a combination of casirivimab and imdevimab developed by the Swiss Roche laboratories and the American company Regeneron; - CT-P59, developed by the Korean group Celltrion; - sotrovimab, developed by the British group GSK.
These four solutions are still undergoing a ‘rolling review’ by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). This first stage - reviewing clinical trial data as they become available, in order to save time - will end when the EMA believes that it has sufficient evidence to consider marketing.
It is therefore difficult to have an exact idea of how long it will take. The Commission, however, still hopes that at least three of these five solutions will be granted a market authorisation by October 2021.
The European institution would ideally like to expand this portfolio to ten candidate solutions by October. On this basis, it will then be able to conclude joint purchasing agreements, provided that at least four Member States wish to purchase one of the potential treatments.
For the time being, an agreement was reached at the end of March with Roche laboratories, to make REGN-COV2 available to interested Member States. The Commission says that others could be launched by the end of the year. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)