The treatment is for people suffering from mild-to-moderate COVID-19, unlike authorized therapies by other drugmakers aimed at more severe cases. The company said its drug helped reduce hospitalization and visits to the ER for clinical trial patients.
Lilly says a clinical trial using that drug in combination with another antibody treatment also reduced hospitalization and the number of patients with high viral load. It says it'll submit a request for that combination therapy in November once it accumulates more safety data and can produce enough doses.
Lilly says it can produce 100,000 doses of its drug this month and as many as 1 million in the fourth quarter.
Separately, Abbott Laboratories said Wednesday interim data from a study showed its rapid coronavirus test correctly identified positive COVID-19 cases 95% of the time. Those results appear to contradict a Cleveland Clinic study in April that showed the test detected the virus in 85% of the cases. That's lower than some other COVID-19 tests. That test is used at the White House.
Shares of both Eli Lilly and Abbott rose at the start of trading Wednesday.
