Germany will become the first European Union country to start using the same experimental antibodies treatment credited with helping Donald Trump recover from Covid-19, health minister Jens Spahn said Sunday.
"The government has bought 200 000 doses for 400 million euros ($486 million)," Spahn told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, working out at 2 000 euros per dose.
Patients will receive them free of charge, a health ministry spokesperson told AFP.
Two different kinds of so-called monoclonal antibody therapies will be made available to university hospitals from the coming week, with Spahn saying Germany was "the first country in the EU" to deploy them in the fight against the pandemic.
Both treatments have been approved for emergency use in the United States but have yet to receive the green light from European regulators.
Trump, who was briefly hospitalised with the coronavirus last October, was treated with Regeneron's therapy, before it had gained formal authorisation.
He later said the medicine did "a fantastic job".
Regeneron's version is a combination or "cocktail" of two lab-made antibodies: infection-fighting proteins that were developed to bind to the surface protein of the coronavirus to stop it from invading human cells.