Eli Lilly announced on Thursday that it is joining forces with Amgen to significantly boost the supply of its potential COVID-19 antibody therapies.
Lilly (LLY) said it entered into a global antibody manufacturing collaboration with Amgen to quickly scale up production and serve many more patients around the world should one or more of its antibody therapies prove successful in clinical testing and receive regulatory approval. Financial terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed.
Lilly is currently studying several potential neutralizing antibodies for the prevention and/or treatment of COVID-19 as either monotherapy or as a combination therapy.
“Based on our initial clinical studies, we believe that virus neutralizing antibodies, including LY-CoV-555, could play an important role in the fight against COVID-19,” said Lilly’s chief scientific officer Daniel Skovronsky. “Increasing the manufacturing capacity for our neutralizing antibodies through this collaboration with Amgen is a crucial next step, and together we hope to be able to produce many millions of doses even next year.”
Shares in LLY are up 15% year-to-date and the stock scores a bullish Strong Buy Street consensus. That’s with a $ 175.83 average analyst price target, indicating 16% upside potential lies ahead.
Mizuho Securities analyst Vamil Divan this week reiterated a Hold rating on the stock with a $164 price target, calling this month’s interim data from LLY’s Phase 2 trial of its COVID-19 neutralizing antibody LY-CoV555, “inconclusive”.
“The antibody delivered some encouraging data points on benefiting patients earlier in the course of the disease, potentially complementing other therapies that have shown benefit in patients already hospitalized with COVID-19,” Divan wrote in a note to investors. “However, the primary endpoint was strangely only positive for the middle dose and no statistical information is provided to assess the numerically lower rates of hospitalizations and ER visits seen in the trial.”
“With what appears to be a relatively clean safety profile, there is likely a role for LY-CoV555 and other neutralizing antibodies in the treatment of COVID-19, but we believe that exact role is still to be determined,” the analyst added. (See Eli Lilly’s stock analysis on TipRanks).
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