It's Friday, November. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America. The FDA this week gave the emergency use authorization to Eli Lily for their monoclonal anybody COVID treatment. It is similar to the treatment that President Trump received when he was sick, and it is aimed at keeping mild cases from turning more serious. The process of getting this treatment developed and improved was difficult, and that the company also had to
deal with the pandemic at the same time. They had a trim down their staff, work remotely in some cases, and the chief of the lab how to use a robot with an iPad attached to it so he could patrol that lab. Peter loftus healthcare reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for how Eli Lily got it done. Thanks for joining us, Peter, Thanks for having me on. I wanted to talk about this drug from Eli Lily.
It's a COVID nineteen drug that is very similar to the one that President Trump took when he was receiving treatment. It's a anti body treatment and the FDAY just authorized emergency use of it. Peter if you can help us out tell us a little bit more about how this drug works. And then the difficulty in actually manufacturing this because Eli Lily had to also go through a shutdown throughout the pandemic, and the way they changed their practices to be able to still get this out is pretty amazing.
So Peter, tell us what we know about this drug. Sure, So the drug I believe is pronounced them lenivum ev.
So this drug is called a monoclonal antibody, and it's from Eli Lily, and it's something that's essentially an engineered version of the immune system antibodies that are produced in response to the coronavirus and so, and the way that they developed it was they analyzed a blood sample from an early survivor of COVID nineteen and they kind of isolated what they thought were the most potent antibodies in that blood sample, and then they basically clone them in
a factory to turn them into a pharmaceutical treatment. And so what has happened over the past twenty four hours is that the FDA has authorized the emergency use of this antibody, and in particular in patients with mild to moderate COVID nineteen, So people who are not in the hospital, who aren't so severe, but they wanted to be prioritized for people that that they may have mild to moderate symptoms of COVID nineteen, but for certain reasons, they might
be at higher risk of worsening to severe disease where they did end up in the hospital. And so that would include people, say over the age of six, or people who are overweight or have other chronic conditions that might put them at higher risk. And tell me a little bit about how they make this, because we're talking about the difficulties and we'll get into how the workers
there had to adjust to all this. But these drugs are grown in living cells, they're fed nutrients, they're put in stainless steel tanks with ovary cells from Chinese hamster. I mean, this is like crazy science stuff when you're really talking about it. It's always fascinating to hear about the source material for some of the ingredients that go into two pharmaceuticals. I think one of the vaccines has
a component that's derived from I think tree bark. But in any case, yeah, in this case, this lilli antibody, this is actually a fairly common manufacturing method for this type of drug, where it's grown in living cells and they use a medium, They use a solution that sort of allows the protein of interest to proliferate, to spread and replicate. And so in this case, they're using the solution that includes Chinese hamster ovary cells. And what they're
doing is they're in this solution. They start with a small amount, but eventually that helps grow a very large amount of the antibody. And it's all the same antibody, but it's just a large amount of it. And so they grow that in large amounts and then they purify it and then package it and biles so that the amount necessary in each file to treat one patient. And now tell me a little bit about the process that the company had to go through to actually do this.
We just talked about how complicated that process is and how very specific it is. But at the plant where they were making this production, you know, they had maybe about sixty five workers to begin with. They had to whittle that down to twenty or thirty, and then everybody's working remotely. Like I said, they had to go through
this and make this drug for the pandemic. While the pandemic was ongoing, you know, as everyone knows, a lot of companies in all industries had to make a lot of adjustments having people work from home, that sort of thing, and so the drug companies have to do that too. But then they're the ones who are actually working on the drugs and vaccines that hopefully will be effective in ending the pandemic, and so they have to do that while taking these steps to prevent the spread of the
virus in the facility and to protect their workers. And so in Lily's case, they're based in Indianapolis, and they back in March, I think when all the lockdowns were starting, they sent a significant majority of their employees to work from home. So that did include a lot of office jobs, but it also included scientists, people that work in research labs that it included in some cases manufacturing workers. And so the idea was to reduce the number of people
on site two as low as they could go. But obviously they're still going to need some people on site both to work on the COVID projects but also to continue to make other drugs that Eli Lily makes, and so they just tried to keep that at a lower number. So that would be fewer people there to transmit the virus or to be just to be exposed. And yeah,
they had to just make a lot of adjustments. One part of the of the manufacturing process was taking what was manufactured in these big steel tanks out of the solution that I just talked about, and then putting the final product into vials. And they bought this mobile lab. It basically looks like a tractor trailer, but it's customized to sit outside the factory because they felt this was the quickest way to do this, and that was where
they actually put the drug into vials. And they found that it took some practice and training to get the employees used to working in close proximity, even with protective gear, because you know, at that point, earlier in the year, people had become so accustomed to keeping distant from everybody,
and they just people were a little leery about it. Yeah, I mean even one of the doctors was rolling around on a little robot with an iPad attached to it, just so they can live stream things back and forth. So what are the next steps for them? The US is going to start distributing this as soon as it can. I think they started saying as soon as this week they were going to start distributing some of it. What's
next for them. The federal government has signed a supply contract where they're buying three thousand doses of this little the antibody, and because they're buying it, they're in a
customer essentially, they're going to allocate it. And so right now, I think there's about eighty thou doses that are ready to go in fairly short order, and the federal government has already made decisions about which states they'll go to or or in what amounts to each state, and they make that decision by looking at where this community spread is the is the worst basically, so states like Wisconsin Illinois have very high rates right now, and so they're
getting a fairly high number of doses. And then Eli Lily is increasing its manufacturing of the antibody, and so they're going to try to have many more doses by the end of the year. And it will be a situation where, at least for the time being, the federal government will see how many new doses are produced in a given week and then parcel them out to various
parts of the country, and then state officials. Local health departments would be in charge of figuring out, you know what hospitals or say, infusion clinics should get the doses and then eventually into patients. Well, I mean good news on all that front. Hopefully we can get this squared away very quickly and get it to people that really need it and help them out that way. Peter loftus healthcare reporter at the Wall Street Journal, thank you very
much for joining us my pleasure. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget efforts to day's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every money through Friday, So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast