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Fifty years ago today, on January 31, 1971, at 4:03 pm EST, a Saturn V rocket lifted off from Pad A of Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Center carrying Apollo 14 – the Moon mission that would make or break the US space program.

If Apollo 14 is remembered at all by most people, it's mainly as the answer to trivia questions like, who was the oldest man to walk on the Moon, or what is the longest lunar golf drive? But it was far more than that. Arguably, it was one of the most important of all the Apollo lunar landing missions, with the possible exception of Apollo 11.

This is because Apollo 14 was the follow-on mission from the ill-fated Apollo 13, which suffered an oxygen tank explosion on the way to the Moon that crippled the Command Service Module (CSM) and forced the three astronauts aboard to use the Lunar Module (LM) as a lifeboat as they struggled to return to Earth.

It was a heroic episode that showed the value of courage, innovation, and training, but it also almost killed the Apollo program, which was already faced with an indifferent public and a hostile congress that would rather spend the NASA budget elsewhere. This put a lot of pressure on the space agency and the crew of Apollo 14. If it failed, if it was forced to turn back, it would almost certainly have been the last American Moon landing for the foreseeable future.

    Promising interim data from a unique Phase 3 trial testing the efficacy of a monoclonal antibody cocktail developed to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection has been announced by pharmaceutical company Regeneron. The preliminary results suggest this novel treatment is 100 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection, but despite these positive signs there are concerns the prohibitive cost of producing monoclonal antibody therapies will severely limit widespread use.

   Last week pharma company Eli Lilly revealed its monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19 is 80 percent effective at preventing viral infection. Not to be outdone, Lilly’s major monoclonal antibody competitor Regeneron is now announcing early results from its ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial.

Monoclonal antibody treatments are a little different to vaccines. Instead of teaching a body how to produce antibodies against a virus, monoclonal antibodies are a single dose of lab-produced antibodies intended to either prevent infection or reduce the severity of a disease for a short period of time.

Regeneron’s therapy is called REGEN-COV and it comprises two different but complimentary types of lab-engineered antibodies developed to rapidly stop the virus from replicating inside an infected patient. These kinds of monoclonal antibody therapies are designed to be administered to subjects at high-risk of being infected with SARS-CoV-2, or given to patients at the very earliest stage of COVID-19.