Antibody cocktail President Trump has been treated with is being used on some UW-Health patients

MADISON (CBS 58) -- The experimental COVID-19 antibody cocktail President Donald Trump has been treated with is also being used on some UW-Health patients. 

In July, the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health announced that three clinical trials would be conducted to test the treatment in collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. 

It has not yet been approved by the FDA. 

There are three arms to the study for hospitalized patients, non-hospitalized patients, and people who have been exposed to someone in their household with COVID-19. 

"The outpatient arm in which patients are COVID positive, we’ve had 7 subjects enroll in that and in the in-patient arm with COVID positive patients we’ve had 5 patients treated there," said Dr. William Hartman, assistant professor of anesthesiology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, who is leading the study. 

Hartman said Regeneron announced the first data this week from the trial focusing on those receiving outpatient treatment. 

"What they saw was that individuals that were treated -- and this is a randomized controlled trial where they compare it to placebo -- but they saw with treated patients that there was a decrease in both the viral load and the time to recover," Hartman said. 

He said the ideal candidate for the antibody cocktail is someone who has been diagnosed with COVID-19, but haven't had symptoms for very long, but if they do have mild symptoms, they're not sick enough to go to the hospital. 

"They may have a sore throat, loss of taste and smell. They may feel fatigued, they may have a fever, those symptoms qualify them," he said. 

He said he was not surprised to hear President Trump received the treatment. 

"Based on what came out earlier this week from Regeneron, and the fact that there’s really not that many outpatient treatments available and this was looking very promising in the data that was revealed this week, I think it was probably a very appropriate therapy for the president and I was actually excited that he had received it," Hartman said. 

He said while there is a good safety profile, they don't know what all the side effects are. 

"And so the fact that one of the reasons they’ve taken the President to the hospital to monitor him for side effects isn’t that surprising,  simply because we just don’t know what those could be, although we don’t anticipate anything out of the ordinary occurring," he said. 

Hartman said the need to continue to enroll more people in the study to see if it maintains the same level of efficacy that has been seen. He said the trial will go on for a few more months and then they will go in front of the FDA to see if it can become approved.