Here is part of the Regeneron transcript from the Healthcare Conference..Sounds familiar to me.
Finally, we have been trying to do our part to serve COVID. As you know, early on, we were able to really through a Herculean effort get a monoclonal antibody out there, a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies that could address a treatment paradigm for COVID. We did this in record time, and it worked great for a while. But like many of these antibodies that have come forth -- and now all of them, in fact, the virus has outsmarted them.
The virus has mutated in a way that the antibodies that you might make and even in response to being infected with the virus, you might make in response to a vaccine or you might get from us, all seem to be now being evaded by the latest strains that are taking over, such as the XBB. The team has been hard at work, and I think we have hit sort of a jackpot antibody that George is going to tell you now about that we're going to push forward very rapidly.
Moving now beyond immuno-oncology, and as Len mentioned, we continue to use our antibody technologies to play our part in the COVID pandemic. Despite mass vaccinations, millions of immuno-compromised people in the United States alone don't adequately respond and are less vulnerable. Monoclonal antibodies could help protect and treat vulnerable patient populations like these, but viral variants rendered obsolete all previously authorized antibodies, including our REGEN-COV, which had helped so many.
We have one of the most sophisticated and largest screening efforts for COVID antibodies, and we believe we have identified one-in-a-million antibody that works very differently to all prior antibodies by binding outside of the immuno-dominant highly variable RBD and NTD domains. These domains have been the primary site of antibody binding and correspondingly of variant mutations.
We have caused the initial vaccines in previous COVID antibody therapies to lose their activities. We hope that by binding outside of these domains to a unique targeted epitope that is highly conserved, with over 99.9% conservations since the beginning of the pandemic, it will lower the risk of losing activity against future variants. Importantly, this antibody, known as REGEN14287 demonstrates high neutralization potency against all known SARS-CoV-2 variants and lineages to date. Activities enabling clinical manufacturing have commenced, and we expect to enter clinical development later this year.
