National Institutes of Health Launches its ACTIV-5 “Big Effect Trial” Evaluating Humanigen’s Lenzilumab™ as Potential COVID-19 Therapy

Excerpt from the Press Release:

Burlingame, CA – October 13, 2020 – Humanigen, Inc., (Nasdaq: HGEN) (“Humanigen”), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on preventing and treating an immune hyper-response called ‘cytokine storm’ with its lead drug candidate lenzilumab™, today announced that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), launched its ACTIV-5 “Big Effect Trial” (ACTIV-5/BET), designed to determine whether certain approved therapies or investigational drugs in late-stage clinical development show promise against COVID-19 and, therefore, merit advancement into larger clinical trials. ACTIV-5/BET, which will enroll at as many as 40 US sites, will evaluate lenzilumab with remdesivir, compared to placebo and remdesivir, in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with approximately 100 patients assigned to each study arm. Humanigen is providing lenzilumab for the study, which is fully funded by NIH.

ACTIV-5/BET is being conducted in collaboration with the NIH’s public-private partnership Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Innovations and Vaccines (ACTIV) program. The ACTIV partnership has evaluated approximately 400 therapeutic agents with a potential application for COVID-19 and developed a collaborative framework for prioritizing the most promising candidates, streamlining clinical trials, coordinating regulatory processes, and leveraging assets among all partners to rapidly respond to the COVID-19 and future pandemics. To date, ACTIV has designed five adaptive master protocols for ACTIV clinical trials, and selected numerous NIH-supported networks to launch these clinical trials to test prioritized therapeutic candidates.

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