Two Covid-19 antibody therapies are no longer recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), on the basis that Omicron and the variant's latest offshoots have likely rendered them obsolete.
The two therapies, sotrovimab and casirivimab-imdevimab, were designed to work by binding to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 to neutralise the virus' ability to infect cells.
They were some of the first medicines developed early in the pandemic. The virus has since evolved, and mounting evidence from lab tests suggests the two therapies have limited clinical activity against the latest iterations of the virus.
WHO experts said they strongly advised against the use of the two therapies in patients with Covid-19, reversing previous conditional recommendations endorsing them, as part of recommendations published in the British Medical Journal.