WOBURN, Mass. — A Woburn-based biotech company says it’s seeing early success with COVID-19 antibody treatments.
Scientists at Abpro have been studying antibodies for a decade but the CEO says this research hits differently.
“Just driving through Boston seeing all the devastation and all the people impacted, all the folks who’ve died in nursing homes, everything that’s going on around the country. We knew something had to be done and very quickly,” said Ian Chan, CEO of Abpro.
Boston 25 got exclusive access to the lab in Woburn where researching are working around the clock testing antibodies against COIVD-19 in hopes of finding and effective therapeutic treatment.
“We’re extremely excited about it,” said Chan.
The company just wrapped up phase one of research where 42 coronavirus patients were tested with Abpro’s therapeutic antibody treatment.
“We’ve seen phenomenal data coming out that shows the antibodies neutralizing the virus,” said Chan.
In many cases the patients recovered from the virus within days.
Earlier this week the FDA approved an anti-viral medication to treat COVID-19 but currently no antibody therapeutic treatments have made it through the approval process. The CDC says however, there is evidence that antibody treatments can work to fight off the virus.
“We’re working as quickly as we can. We know there’s a huge urgent need especially with all the patients hospitalized right now so there are certain paths that we hope can lead to an approval faster,” said Chan.
The lab is now moving onto phase two which includes a larger test pool of hundreds of patients worldwide. Phase three is FDA approval which Abpro is hoping to get sometime in 2021.
A glimmer of hope for the millions of people worldwide at risk of contracting the virus.
“This is our way to help out. I think it will be rewarding to see. To help anyway we can. To help patients who are affected by this,” said Chan.
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