After Donald Trump was hospitalized last week following a positive test for COVID-19, he emerged from Walter Reed with all the “Scarface” energy of one of his sons, declaring that, after “some really great drugs” he felt better than he did twenty years ago. Those drugs include Regeneron’s REGN-COV2, a monoclonal antibody cocktail that is not approved by the FDA but was administered through a process known as compassionate use. (Regeneron’s CEO, Dr. Leonard S. Schleifer, is also a friend of the Trump family.) Mainstream and social media quickly lit up over Trump’s revelations, especially when he declared that the treatment “wasn’t just therapeutic, it made me better. I call that a cure.”
But is it?
If you’ve ever seen television ads for drugs with names like Opdivo (nivolumab) or Keytruda (pembrolizumab), you may notice a common denominator in their nomenclature. That “mab” — usually written as “mAb” — at the end is short for “monoclonal antibodies,” antibodies engineered in a lab. Continue reading.