A human monoclonal 1 antibody blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection
biorxiv.org
biorxiv.org
Usually, when they report on a discovery done by Dutch researchers, it is considered newsworthy because the researchers are Dutch, not because the research itself is particularly noteworthy. So in addition to the usual reservations that one should have when noteworthy discoveries make the news, there's an extra reason not to hold your breath until you see this appear in international publications as well.
"Usually"? Do you have examples?
Do you actually have any evidence that substantiates your claim? Wild speculations and conspiracy theories should not have a place in discussions regarding serious matters.
And the comment is quite literally a theory on how someone is conspiring.
Asking for evidence that supports a hefty claim was never, at any point in time or space, dishonesty. It's in fact the basis for the scientific method, and the basis for laws against libel and slander.
Throwing personal attacks like yours, however, particularly while intentionally turning a blind eye to the lack of substance or support of a few claims based on a conspiracy theory, speaks volumes about you.
Since you're so critical of conspiracies, though, I'd (genuinely) love your take on something that does require a conspiracy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/cost-insurance-di...
(For me the Google amp link brought up the full article.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opin...
).
Without a conspiracy, what keeps any drug company from selling cheap generic insulin in the United States?
The reason I ask is that I really don't think so many companies can cooperate on price-fixing so I am looking for any other alternative explanation besides an illegal price-fixing conspiracy which I think would be very difficult to pull off among so many players and laws making it illegal.
But the comment you replied to isn't like that and doesn't require a conspiracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-fixing_conspira...
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/business/worldbusiness/12...
https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/igamisugaya_1...
That’s just a few, and just the ones they caught. It’s very hard to prosecute this case, and the incentive to collude is huge.
This is still cutting edge biotech used for experimental treatment for cancer and other diseases often getting an orphan drug or other exemption certification to go on the market.
You also will be hard pressed to find insurance companies to cover these atm.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Some scientists still had these antibodies from previous research, and so far it looks promising. It has not been tried on humans yet, which can take months.
There’s a reasonable chance this might eventually become the medicine.
I imagine not everyone feels comfortable potentially killing someone with a creation of theirs that they're not confident in, even if others are willing to risk it.
The speed with which things that help against this coronavirus are being found really is impressive. It is good to be facing this in the modern era instead of 50 years ago.
e.g. if dying from the immune response or a co-infection.
However, the user-supplied fixes have probably been a huge contributing factor to getting the translations where they're today. And Googlers reviewing some translations for their training data sets ;)
I believe it was French to Dutch. The result was basically perfect.
That's why the deaths are almost entirely the very old and immunocompromised.
is it bacterial infection post virus harm then ?
Could you provide a source?
Everything I've seen so far (eg, [0]) points to the virus itself damaging respiratory tissue, and normal body immune response aggravating that locally to some extent.
A cytokine storm [1] is, as I understand it, a massive systemic immune overreaction causing way too much inflammation, overwhelming the body all at once.
That Wikipedia entry suggests that SARS may have caused a cytokine storm, at least in some patients, but from it and everything I understand about the phenomenon, it's recognizable in epidemiology largely by the greatly increased incidence of deaths among young, healthy patients—which is not at all what we see in COVID-19.
[0] https://www.uticaod.com/zz/news/20200313/what-does-coronavir...
A commentor posted English translation:
'Erasmus MC and Utrecht University find antibody against corona'
A group of ten scientists from the Erasmus Medical Center and Utrecht University say they have found an antibody against the coronavirus, reports Erasmus Magazine.
"To our knowledge, this is the very first antibody that we know blocks the infection and there is a good chance that it will also become a drug on the market," said Professor of Cell Biology Frank Grosveld. It has yet to be tested on humans, which takes months.
The publication about the find is at the discretion of colleagues, after which it may be published in the leading trade journal Nature. "Prevention is better than cure, of course," says Grosveld. "A real solution is therefore a vaccine, others are working on that. However, developing a vaccine takes two years."
If it passesthe review stage it will probably be published in the scientific Journal Nature.
Note: this is not a vaccine. Its a treatment option for people who are already sick.
The part that is most relevant for the development of a new drug/treatment is the safety and efficiency testing in the clinical studies - and that alone will take many months. It can be shortened if it is a drug that has been used before for something else (e.g. that chloroquine for malaria) and is only repurposed because there we know the drug is safe already. For a completely new drug it could take a year or more just to do the testing and get the approvals.
So I wouldn't have high hopes to see this being deployed widely any time soon.
> So I wouldn't have high hopes to see this being deployed widely any time soon.
I don't know, I mean, this is one of those things where compassionate use seems likely? Won't we end up trying that and doing studies on them after?
If the drug or vaccine you are developing ends up killing more people than saving it is not much of a cure, is it?
The same if the drug isn't effective - in that case it would be wasting critical resources and probably causing the sick to not get a really effective treatment.
That said, this process will be certainly sped up to maximum amount possible, given the situation, but it will still take a long time.
Biologics like this are new enough that we don’t really know the time courses but in a normal situation it’s still multiple years.
> This is the first known antibody that blocks the infections
> The antibodies have to be tested in humans, which can take months
> The research still has to be peer reviewed
> It stops the virus from further internal infections, allowing the patient to recover
> They are trying to get a pharmaceutical company to mass-produce it
> A vaccine would be a real solution, others are working on it. Vaccine development can take 2 years
How long would it take for such a product to go from the lab to application in the general population?--what are the key variables that factor into such an estimate? Is there some expedited process in the case of a pandemic?
For a medicine, a lot of the red tape can be cut, as you might test it on otherwise hopeless cases. There is a limited risk associated (that one person might die) and the results in the case it works are also easy to monitor.
With vaccines, things become complicated. - vaccines are given to healthy population, and to large parts of the population. So they need to be extremely safe, or you end up killing more than the disease would have had. This is obviously not acceptable and extensive safety testing needs to be done.
- you need to find out, whether the vaccine works at all. Creating a working vaccine against a virus like corona is very tricky - we don't for example have a working vaccine against the cold. So making sure the vaccine has the intended effect takes a long time, especially, if you consider that all tests have to be done with healthy people.
So currently some antiviral medicine is being tested at sick people and some results could be out soon, but for a vaccine, mid-2021 are the most optimistic timelines I heard.
Efforts need to be made to drastically trim the time-span it takes for a successfully trialed COVID-19 vaccine to get from laboratories to hospitals and into patient's veins.
I'm sure many countries and billion-dollar companies are at it, but making it affordable to people who need it the most is a challenge in itself.
The weapons the fighter cells use are antibodies. In this case, the discovery has directly produced antibodies, which are helpful in fighting the virus (but cannot be used to proactively create memory cells). Antibodies have the advantage that they don't trigger the body's immune system, which means less issues to deal with.
Hope this (and other efforts being done) pass testing and get in the field as soon as possible.
This is a reason to suspect that a vaccine may not be easily developed; so antibody therapy (and/or anti-virals) might be the best we can do.
If the antibody therapy was highly effective and could be produced at scale for a tolerable cost, it would probably be a pretty effective tool. Though monoclonal antibodies aren't known for being particularly affordable.
Treatment with antibodies might be useful as an immediate fix, but vaccination or infection and the development of a proper immune response is the long term requirement for resistance.
Of course antibodies exist against the virus - otherwise the fatality rate would be 100%. You don't just survive an infection, your body creates antibodies, and they stay in your body for a very very long time. That's the whole point of vaccination.
Once this blows over I'll go get my blood tested for antibodies for the virus - will be interesting to know if I had it.
That was the starting point of the research project.
Then, after some work, the team actually managed to identify one, and one that also neutralizes the virus.