This may be a stupid question. But can the antibodies be synthesized based on samples from recovered patients? If not, why?
Using animals when possible (for example horses, for the production of snake venom antidotes) seems more efficient in cost, volume and time.
Take for instance this crisis. They just need the plasma of immune individuals to give temporary immunity to sick or at risk individuals. It doesn’t scale but it works.
Some good basic reads:
Antigens - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigen
Humoral Inmunity -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humoral_immunity
Synthetic antibodies -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_antibody
Antibodies memetic - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody_mimetic
Could the former be amenable to treatment as an engineering problem? There are a lot of motivated engineering minds right now.
If you use human donors, you need trained doctors spending time and equipment to select the donors, handle the donors, take care of them during the donation which takes hours (the needle is stuck in their vein during that time), trained professionals using expensive equipment to process the donation, and then trained doctors to perform the infusion on the patient, an hour or two, but you still want keep the patient in the hospital overnight in case of complications, which do happen often enough that it was practice to do so: as in, once in thousand. At the end all that work, it is relatively sure that the described work could result in protection of exactly one patient more than before you started. The percentage of known complications and the potential for failure in every step is what makes it non scalable.
With non human donors you can avoid some work, but the second part remains: it's not "just a shot" like when you do a vaccination which is scalable.
And while vaccination is scalable, if you're going to vaccinate billions, you also want to be very sure you aren't harming them, that's why speeding up vaccine production is not scalable. Even producing the vaccines is not easy at all to scale.
It's not that nobody has attempted hard to achieve this up to now.
In a critical situation such as the pandemic, it seems to me, from a project management and engineering perspective, that it might be worth ramping up production of a vaccine (or several) even before it has passed later stage trials, and maybe even pre-distribute it a bit to national storage facilities. So if the trials look great and the side effects are sufficiently minimal, the delay for manufacture and distribution will be reduced after the trials.
But I guess I see all sorts of political problems with that, if the trials are good but the side effects are a problem, or say it causes a horrible desease for 0.1% of people down the line. The pressure to use the product would be immense, despite the trial saying no this is not safe.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-long-will-it-ta...
"There may never be a market for a vaccine at the end of the development process, because the epidemic is contained, or never comes to pass. Then, traditionally, if there is an epidemic, it may take hold in a developing country where the costs of research and development cannot be recouped. “The resources and expertise sit in biotech and pharma, and they’ve got their business model,” Grant said. “They’re not charities. They can’t do this stuff for free.”"
The "investors" just want the growth of their money, even the money they make would become meaningless after the pandemics that's efficient enough. The nature is indeed capable to set its own growth not caring about the "interests of investors."
Obviously the whole structure as well as the priorities just have to be set differently. The next time could be even much worse than now.
Which must be a political decision for change, not a technological "invention". The technology is not a "deux ex machina" -- the natural limitations are real. Some solutions exist but simply can't be expected to "make profit every time." So how can it be done? Taxes. What was too dangerous selling point for generations of politicians? "Less taxes."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
But the taxes are even now used, and spent in mind boggling amount, just for other priorities, year after year:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/magazine/f35-joint-strike...
>Regeneron scientists have isolated hundreds of neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus from a humanized mouse model as well as from humans who have recovered from COVID-19, the company said Tuesday.
In principle, yes, but antibodies are more complicated than normal molecules (glycosylation, protein folding) so you can really only industrially prepare them in certain types of cells (pretty much Chinese Hamster Ovary, last I checked).
Another problem is retrieving the correct antibody gene sequence. All immunoactive antibodies have been subjected to a process of internal evolution and artificial selection. Their DNA is not the same as your germline DNA, through shuffling and active mutation events, and indeed every immune cell that produces antibodies has different DNA than the other ones (that haven't been told to clone themselves) so it's really difficult to retrieve the correct gene sequence.
In practice I wouldn't estimate it to be possible to do this in the 4-6 month timeframe. Maybe in the 6-12 month timeframe under emergency duress situations.
Many medicines today use murine (mouse) monoclonal antibodies.
Tl;dr: because biology at scale is complicated.
Longer-form, because antibodies and immunological response are somewhat complicated. Knowing what an antibody looks like, how to produce it, and how to scale that production in a safe and reliable way are all very different things.
Older article, but general concepts: http://neobiolab.com/research/in-vitro-and-in-vivo-productio...
... And because the in vivo methods we know of are ethically dicey. To rephrase it in rough terms -- creating custom cancers that produce the thing we want and giving them to mice, then harvesting concentrated antibodies from the tumors.