Current values. Your laboratory has embarked on the race for treatment against Covid-19. Where are you today?
Odile Duvaux. As I told you during our previous interview, since 2015 we have been working on a treatment project against coronaviruses. Accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, this project benefited from several funding – the region, the metropolis, individuals, the BPI, Europe – the planned plan could therefore be implemented, resulting in the development drug and at the start of the clinical trial phase. This last step could have started last June, but certain delays by the regulatory authorities cost us a few months of delay … Despite this, the results to be drawn are positive: we have made great progress, and not only on coronaviruses, we have doubled in size, we have surrounded ourselves with a large number of new skills which now make Xenothera much more of a pharmaceutical lab than a small “biotech”.
What can you tell us about this drug, XAV-19?
That it works well, already! It is effective even at low doses, it is especially armed against variants due to its polyclonal character (monoclonal are much more fragile). It is in the form of an antibody solution, to be administered via a simple infusion, over a period of thirty to forty minutes. The range of action of antibodies is well known; it involves treating patients when their condition begins to worsen, within six to ten days of infection. At this point some patients fall into a more serious condition which presents a risk of aggravation, this is the time when they need XAV-19. Furthermore, the anti-inflammatory properties of XAV-19 support the action of the corticosteroids generally administered to these patients. It is therefore an ideal candidate to help the 1,500 people admitted daily to the French emergency services.
What is your point of view as a specialist on the controversies that surrounded Professor Raoult’s work?
Without going into detail, I would say that there is such an expectation of answers from the general public, the media or politicians, that scientists, the “knowing”, have suddenly been given an inordinate importance. When you face such a demand, it is hard to resist. However, in this kind of situation, unprecedented and complex, if someone tells you “I know”, you can be sure that he does not know! All those who have spoken regularly since the start of the epidemic have been wrong at one time or another – Didier Raoult like Jérôme Salomon or Jean-François Delfraissy.
Obviously, there are many more people to be vaccinated than patients to be treated, the price and volume issues are quite different.
However, do you point your finger at some blunders in government communication?
On one point especially: we have talked so much about vaccines that people come to confuse vaccines and treatment! I repeat it often: vaccines are for people who are not sick. Those who are sick, and there are still many of them, it is a treatment, it is care that they hope for! Political communication has become simplistic, it’s a shame. Obviously, there are many more people to be vaccinated than patients to be treated, the price and volume issues are quite different. Between a thousand and ten thousand times fewer doses of treatment are needed than vaccines.
Are you not worried that we will end up invoking this next collective immunity to abandon research on treatments?
It would be a strategic error. First, there is every reason to believe that the pandemic will not disappear like that, there may be other waves, or even that we will have to live with this virus or its variants. Second, the existence of vaccines never meant that there would be no more sick – we can see it for many other diseases such as tuberculosis or tetanus, or even the flu. There will always be sick people to treat. The Germans have understood this, who have just bought for four hundred million euros – it is not nothing, even for the Germans – two hundred thousand doses of an American antibody, however simply monoclonal! It should give our leaders pause.
What do you expect from the government?
Let him simply answer our question: are you interested in the XAV-19? We are in phase II / III. We need the clinical trial to be encouraged as a true National Research Priority, a label it officially obtained in December 2020. We need hospitals to recruit patients for this trial! And we need to know if the government is ready to pre-order the XAV-19, to start anticipating production to be ready for the epidemic wave of the fall. Otherwise, unfortunately, we will respond to external requests, but that would be a shame.
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