Biomed Lublin said it has successfully completed the first stage of production of a Polish drug to treat the coronavirus.
The drug, which uses plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients and from those who were infected without showing symptoms, will now be tested in clinical trials.
“We’re the first in the world to have a drug for COVID-19, a drug that works, a drug containing antibodies that neutralize the coronavirus,” Grzegorz Czelej, a senator from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, told a press conference on Wednesday in the eastern city of Lublin.
Biomed Lublin said in a statement: “If everything goes according to plan, Poland will in a few months be the first country in the world to have an effective drug ‘neutralizing the virus’.”
Marcin Piróg, chairman of the board of Biomed Lublin, said the drug would be sent for trials in four Polish cities: Warsaw, Lublin, Bytom and Białystok.
Polish experts said last month that their expectations of the new medicine were “really high.”
A total of 81,673 people have tested positive for the coronavirus in Poland since the start of the pandemic, and 2,344 have died from the COVID-19 respiratory disease so far, officials said on Wednesday.
Poland’s health minister, Adam Niedzielski, has said he expects around a thousand new coronavirus infections a day in the near future.
He was speaking after Poland on Saturday reported a new record daily rise in coronavirus infections, confirming 1,002 new cases, the most since the pandemic hit the country in early March.
Niedzielski said last week that a vaccine against the coronavirus was likely to be available in the country next spring.
He reporters on Friday: “I think that there is a very high probability that we will have a vaccine in the spring, which will definitively end the pandemic."
(pk)
Source: PAP