SAb Biotherapeutics, Inc. is now among those companies rushing to produce a COVID-19 treatment, and both the Department of Defense (DoD) and Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) have partnered with it to make it happen.
SAb’s product is called SAB-185 and pushes for a fix through its unique means. Utilizing SAb’s platform technology, it seeks to produce fully human polyclonal antibodies as a foundation for the drug. No blood donations from virus survivors is required for this as the approach would produce larger quantities of the drug than traditional antibody donor methods.
For this, SAb has received around $7.2 million in funding from the DoD’s CBRN Defense Consortium and BARDA. That funding will support manufacturing and preclinical studies and may allow for a Phase 1 clinical trial.
There are currently no vaccines or therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of COVID-19. BARDA and likeminded agencies are working around the clock to find and produce therapeutics that might treat it.
To date, the disease has infected more than 965,000 people worldwide, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, including more than 216,000 in the United States, which is now the epicenter of the pandemic.