THE drug company Eli Lilly announced Monday that patients have received doses in the first human trial of a potential antibody treatment designed to prevent and treat COVID-19.

This first phase of the human trials will determine if the medicine, called LY-CoV555, is safe, the company said in a news release. Patients received the doses at major medical centers in the United States, including NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, the company said in a news release.

Results should be available by the end of the month, Eli Lilly said. If the treatment is found to be safe, trials involving a larger number of patients will receive the doses in non-hospital settings.

At the same time, Eli Lilly is starting large-scale manufacturing of this potential therapy, Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories, said in the release.

“If LY-CoV555 becomes part of the near-term solution for COVID-19, we want to be ready to deliver it to patients as quickly as possible, with the goal of having several hundred thousand doses available by the end of the year,” he said.

The Eli Lilly drug would be different than existing antibody tests, which tell if a person has had the coronavirus. Serologic tests, as they’re called, look for antibodies in the blood that are developed when somebody catches COVID-19.

LY-CoV555 is designed to fight, not simply detect, COVID-19.

The drug is a monoclonal antibody “directed against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.

It is designed to block viral attachment and entry into human cells, thus neutralizing the virus, potentially preventing and treating COVID-19,” the release said.

The antibody treatment is a collaboration between Eli Lilly and AbCellera, a Canadian biotechnology company.

(SD-Agencies)