Healthcare companies AbCellera and Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY) reported on Thursday the signing of an agreement to co-develop antibody products for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus.

Under the terms of the agreement, the partners will equally share initial development costs towards a product, and then Lilly will be responsible for all further development, manufacturing and distribution.

The partnership will draw on AbCellera's rapid pandemic response platform, developed under the DARPA Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) Programme, and Lilly's global capabilities for rapid development, manufacturing and distribution of therapeutic antibodies.

AbCellera and Lilly plan to select from 500+ unique antibodies isolated from one of the first US patients who recovered from COVID-19 to create antibody therapeutics for treatment and prevention of the disease. The next step is to screen these antibodies to find the ones most effective in neutralising SARS-CoV-2.

Many of these antibodies will be expressed in collaboration with partners at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and pending agreement with NIAID will be tested for their ability to neutralise the virus.