UPMC docs: Antibody treatment effective
UPMC trials have found that monoclonal antibodies, a treatment that must be given quickly after a COVID-19 diagnosis, can significantly decrease hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus.
At a news conference Wednesday morning, UPMC Executive Vice President Dr. Derek C. Angus said that 70% of UPMC COVID-19 inpatients could have avoided hospitalization if they were treated with monoclonal antibodies.
UPMC has treated about 5,700 patients with monoclonal antibodies so far.
“We have found them to be remarkably safe and remarkably effective, and we want to give them to those that are eligible,” Angus said.
UPMC's OPTIMISE-C19 randomized adaptive trial showed promising first results, finding that two antibody combination treatments being tested — bamlanivimab-etesevimab and casirivimab-imdevimab — were safe and appeared to be equally effective.
The OPTIMISE-C19 trial is aimed at expanding access to monoclonal antibody treatment along with comparing effectiveness with other COVID-19 treatments.
The next phase of the trial, which is in progress, will investigate how well the treatments work against COVID-19 variants such as the delta variant in preventing hospitalization and death.
“Before we launched OPTIMISE-C19, only a small percentage of eligible patients were receiving monoclonal antibody treatment,” Dr. Erin McCreary, UPMC infectious diseases pharmacist and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
“Now we're able to offer monoclonal antibodies in the context of a clinical trial at every single one of our available treatment sites, resulting in a 7.5-fold increase in the number of eligible patients receiving this treatment.”
At the news conference, UPMC representatives also shared statistics on COVID-19 rates among unvaccinated individuals and encouraged eligible people who have not yet been vaccinated to do so.Dr. John Williams, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at UPMC, said that UPMC is “seeing an increase in outpatient cases of COVID in children, in the clinics and emergency department, and an increase in children hospitalized with COVID.”He said the situation wasn't at the same level as some other hospitals and other states with lower vaccination rates, but that “we don't want it to get that bad.“These young children are at a higher risk for getting infected now than any other time during the pandemic because of relaxing of mitigations and because of the delta variant,” Williams said.Williams encouraged people to mask up and get vaccinated and said that people “really have the tools to limit or nearly end this pandemic now, and the primary tool would be vaccination.”Dr. Rachel Sackrowitz, executive vice chairwoman of the Department of Critical Care Medicine at UPMC, said that the risk of being hospitalized is 29 times higher for the unvaccinated. She said that there were 19 times more unvaccinated adult patients under 50 being hospitalized than vaccinated adult patients under 50.“My urgent plea is for everyone eligible to get the vaccine to get one,” Sackrowitz said. “You aren't just getting this vaccine for yourself. You are getting it for those around you.”
