The first five promising candidates treatments against COVID-19 enter the portfolio of EU therapeutic products, the European Commission announced today. “Today we are taking the first step towards a broad portfolio of COVID-19 therapies. As vaccinations progress rapidly, the virus will not go away and patients will need safe and effective treatments to reduce the burden of COVID-19. “Our goal is clear, we aim to identify more candidate treatments that are in development and to approve at least three new treatments by the end of the year”, said the Commissioner for Health, Stella Kyriakidou, reports APE.
According to the Commission, all five candidate therapies are at an advanced stage of development and have a high potential to be among the three new COVID-19 therapies to be approved by October 2021.
In particular, the four treatments included in the EU portfolio are monoclonal antibody therapies and are under rolling evaluation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). One is a combination of bamlanivimab and etesevimab from Eli Lilly, the other is a combination of casirivimab and imdevimab from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and F. Hoffman-La Roche, Ltd. The third treatment is regdanivimab from Celltrion and the fourth treatment is sotrovimab from GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, Inc. Another treatment is immunosuppressive (Eli Lilly’s baricitinib), which has a marketing authorization that could be extended to include the treatment of patients with COVID-19.
A portfolio of at least 10 possible treatments by October
The Commission emphasizes that it will draw up a portfolio of at least 10 possible COVID-19 therapies by October, based on the work of the newly formed group of experts on COVID-19 variants. The selection process will be objective and scientific and the selection criteria will be agreed with the Member States. As different types of products are needed for different patient populations and for different stages of the disease, the team of experts will identify the product categories and select the most promising candidate therapies for each category, based on scientific criteria. The European Medicines Agency will launch more rolling evaluations of promising therapeutic substances by the end of 2021, subject to research and development results.
The EU COVID-19 treatment strategy aims to create a broad portfolio of treatments, with the aim of approving three treatments by October 2021 and possibly two more by the end of the year.
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