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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowWhen the pandemic hit early this year, Eli Lilly and Co. leapt into action, unleashing new R&D, launching drive-thru testing of local health care workers, and taking a leadership role in fighting the virus in its home state.
“Lilly is bringing the full force of our scientific and medical expertise to attack the coronavirus pandemic around the world. Here in our Indiana home, we feel a special responsibility to help bring our community together to practice proven and effective health strategies,” Lilly CEO David Ricks said in an April 1 press release.
It turns out that Ricks’ pronouncement wasn’t exaggeration or corporate spin. For myriad reasons, we in Indianapolis have long felt fortunate that the city is home to Lilly’s headquarters, from its groundbreaking research on medical treatments to its highly paid workforce, including 11,000 employees in the state.
But how a corporation responds to a crisis reveals its true colors. And it’s hard to fathom how Lilly could have responded to the COVID-19 crisis more admirably.
It’s played such a key role in fighting the virus that The Wall Street Journal recently chronicled its efforts on the front page.
While efforts to create a COVID-19 vaccine have garnered the most headlines, Lilly turned its attention to another critical need—helping those who contract the disease get better.
Its COVID-19 treatment is modeled on antibodies produced by survivors. Working with a British Columbian firm, Lilly secured the blood for an antibody and set out to clone it. According to The Journal, Lilly made the copies in stainless-steel tanks containing a medium of ovary cells from Chinese hamsters.
The newspaper noted that preparing an antibody-based drug for human testing normally takes about 17 months, a timetable it chopped to just a couple of months with its COVID drug.
By May, Lilly was ready for a small human trial at hospitals in Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York. Concerned that a third-party courier wouldn’t be able to have patients dosed the same day the drug shipped, Lilly used its corporate jet instead, the newspaper reported.
The herculean effort culminated in regulators on Nov. 9 granting emergency use of the drug to protect mildly sick people from developing severe disease.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, himself a former Lilly executive, said the drug “has the potential to save thousands of lives and significantly reduce the disease’s burden on the health care system.”
Lilly received more good news two weeks later, when regulators granted emergency authorization to use an existing Lilly arthritis medication in combination with a Gilead Sciences antiviral drug to treat severely ill hospitalized patients with COVID-19.
We’re proud that Lilly responded to this public health crisis so aggressively and on so many fronts. But far more important than such warm-and-fuzzy sentiments is the reality that, because of that aggression, lives will be saved and human suffering reduced.•
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