A few weeks after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus as a global pandemic, scientists and experts around the world are still racing against the clock to find a cure that can stop COVID-19 in its track, and it seems a scientist has finally done it.
A scientist featured in Netflix's Pandemic has found a potential coronavirus cure.
Pandemic Scientist Has Found a Potential Coronavirus Cure
According to a report by The New York Post, Dr. Jacob Glanville, who hails from San Francisco, CEO and President of Distributed Bio, and was featured in the Netflix documentary entitled Pandemic, has found a potential cure for COVID-19.
In a tweet, Glanville shared the progress of an antibody therapy they have been working on against the novel coronavirus.
The scientist also shared the imminent development of the cure he and his team has been working on, saying to Checkpoint, a Radio New Zealand program: "I'm happy to report that my team has successfully taken five antibodies that back in 2002 were determined to bind and neutralize, block and stop the SARS virus."
"We've evolved them in our laboratory, so now they very vigorously block and stop the SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] virus as well," Glanville added.
Anti-#COVID19 #therapeutic update. After 9 weeks we have generated extremely potent picomolar antibodies that block known #neutralizing #ACE2 #epitopes, blocking the novel #coronavirus from infecting human cells. Read more at https://t.co/Fht9buIZkU. pic.twitter.com/2v7NMk7kyZ — Dr. Jacob Glanville (@CurlyJungleJake) April 1, 2020
SARS is a close cousin of the new coronavirus that brings COVID-19 infection.
With the knowledge, the researchers created "hundreds of millions of versions" of the antibodies and mutated them and found versions from the pool of mutated ones that cross them over.
After that, the researchers were able to know that it binds on the same spot as the COVID-19 virus--the spot that it uses to gain entry to the body's healthy cell and then blocks it.
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Antibody Therapy to Undergo Testing
The cure would have to go through human testing to know their effect on the COVID-19 patients and whether it is successful and could be mass-produced and sent out to 180 countries and hundreds of thousands of affected people.
But first, the antibody therapy will be sent to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases where they will be put against the virus directly and see whether they work as intended.
If the candidate cure shows promise, human testing will soon follow and will likely take place by the end of the summer.
According to the San Francisco local, the antibody therapy could be given to a patient with coronavirus. Within 20 minutes, their body will be flooded with these antibodies, which will stick to the virus and will stop them from being infectious.
Additionally, Glanville said that it could also be injected to medical frontliners and older people so they would have the antibodies already present in their system and prevent the infection from happening in the first place.
The Downside
However, there's a downside to this potential cure: it can only prevent infection and protect for only eight to 10 weeks, unlike what an actual vaccine would do.
Nevertheless, Glanville and his team have already partnered with two other companies that will help ramp up the production once the antibody therapy against COVID-19 gets approved.
It should be available for compassionate use around September, at the earliest.
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