Covid, monoclonal antibodies are effective against Delta variant: Simg and Simit paper
This was stated by Simg – Italian Society of General Medicine and Primary Care, in collaboration with Simit – Italian Society of Infectious and Tropical Diseases
Covid-19 has led to “the need to hospitalise a very high number of patients.
NHS resources have been put in crisis and it has been necessary to resort to containment measures never implemented before.
While waiting for mass vaccination to avoid severe symptomatic illness and access to hospital, home care is the way forward to avoid situations similar to those of previous waves.
Therefore, close monitoring of patients to apply available therapies for the different stages of the disease becomes a priority.
In this regard, the last few weeks have seen an increase in the use of monoclonal antibodies, a treatment option that brings family doctors closer to hospital specialists and is also at the centre of the European debate.
In the last few days, Stella Kyriakides, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, has announced that the European Union is aiming to authorise five possible new treatments against Covid-19: four monoclonal antibodies and one immunosuppressant drug. Vaccines are continuing, but the virus will not disappear and safe and effective drugs are needed.
This is what the Simg and Simit note reads.
THE SIMG/SIMIT MANUAL FOR HOME THERAPY
The project “The path of the patient with Covid-19 from traditional home care to linkage to care with specialist centres”, organised by Simg – Italian Society of General Medicine and Primary Care, in collaboration with Simit – Italian Society of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, with the unconditional contribution of GSK, “aims to evaluate the options available for the correct approach to the patient with Covid-19.
It starts with the clinical overview and ends with the latest treatment options for the patient managed at home.
The project consists of the development of a manual on the home therapy of the patient with Covid-19 disease, including the initiation of therapy with monoclonal drugs.
The initiative was presented in a national webinar in which the joint Simg/Simit document was presented; this will be followed, on 6-8-13-15 July, by training webinars for doctors at macro-regional level, which will open up the manual to free consultation by the medical profession”.
Simg and Simit “are committed to a concise and practical document on community medicine for the home management of patients with Covid”
Ignazio Grattagliano, SIMG Coordinator for the Puglia Region, underlined this: in the field of home care, monoclonal antibodies are the most up-to-date tool: they make it possible to create a linkage to care between the hospital and the local area and allow, for the first time, local doctors themselves (GPs, paediatricians, USCA doctors, on-call doctors) to prescribe this category of drugs, this time for Covid, but which are also often used in the fields of rheumatology, gastroenterology, oncology and others”.
MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES, SAYS THE SIMG PRESIDENT
To date, monoclonal antibodies are in fact the only true, direct and effective therapeutic treatment against SARS-CoV-2.
Monoclonal antibodies are molecules that make it possible to defeat the virus,” explains Prof. Claudio Cricelli, SIMG President.
They should be administered as soon as possible, when the diagnosis has just been made and when patients present vulnerability profiles: through them we can carry out prophylaxis on people at risk of serious infection.
To date, just over 6,000 doses have been administered, with very high efficacy rates.
New generations of these increasingly sophisticated drugs are on the horizon. The ideal place to administer this therapy is in the patient’s home, where he or she is unaffected by the disease and needs to be protected.
In the meantime, we must focus on early detection of the case and the possibility of administering them easily, parenterally and not intravenously’.
MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES BETWEEN VACCINES AND VARIANTS
If vaccines can help stem the progression of the pandemic, we must remember that the virus will continue to be among us, infecting people and above all infecting fragile individuals, those most at risk of an unfavourable evolution of the disease.
The weapon of monoclonal antibodies will allow us to confront the continuation of the pandemic with great strength,” emphasises Prof. Massimo Andreoni, Simit Scientific Director.
Monoclonal antibodies must be administered at an early stage, which is why we will need the decisive support of General Practitioners in order to make the best and quickest possible use of this fundamental and extremely effective weapon.
The emergence of variants makes a further problem in the use of monoclonals, because these could present resistance to the antibodies themselves.
This is not the case with Delta, for which the studies completed so far show efficacy of the antibodies we are using.
The great advantage of this new therapeutic strategy is that we can modify them and choose the most active ones in the variants that will be generated.
So we will be able to provide individualised therapy, with a monoclonal antibody directed not only against a specific variant, but also tailored to the individual patient”.
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