A human monoclonal antibody blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection

biorxiv.org

47 points·JanSt··9 comments

"Monoclonal antibody" automatically means $50-150K per course of treatment pretty much. And while that price does not reflect the actual cost of just producing the drug, these drugs are legit expensive to produce as well, just not to such an extent.

The average annual cost of 1 year of mAb treatment is about 100K [1], which jibes with your estimate. However, that is one year of treatment. Fully human mAbs have a pretty long serum half-life. COVID-19 should clear from 1 or 2 administrations, not the 12-24 per year typically seen with other mAbs. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29461857

Be that as it may, it's still way too expensive to be of use when treating millions of patients, even if the necessary quantities could be quickly produced, which they can not.

~10K for an effective single-dose treatment is not that expensive. Admittedly this is a very crude calculation, but it's probably not too far off. Moreover, mAb production is a very mature technology, that can be scaled up by just growing more cells. I'm not saying we are close to getting this into the clinic, but it is a very interesting result.

Across 100M people that's a cool trillion dollars.

True, but even if we're only talking dollars, we'd have to compare that trillion to the economic amount lost by not inoculating.

There would be a lot of dead people but the economic impact of those deaths would be pretty insignificant because highest fatality rate is for people in their 80s.

I think you underestimate the psycho-social effects of having millions of deaths.

So many disclaimers at the top of this about the validity of the information.

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