How does one isolate a specific antibody from the blood? Presumably there are thousands (millions?) of different ones in there for all kinds of pathogens.
Any materials you can recommend for complete novices in industrial biology processes?
Is it unusually difficult for this coronavirus? eg I've heard it's unusually large.
Do people actually still do it this way? I would have thought that you would use more targeted approaches where you use an antigen to fish for cells of interest before culturing. There are a few such techniques described here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.0169...
Naively, i would have thought you could do something with affinity columns or magnetic beads, too - coat beads with antigen, then use those to extract B cells expressing a matching surface immunoglobulin.
The antigen is also a protein, I assume the DNA sequence for it is well known. Right?
How far are we in terms of tech to print custom proteins from arbitrary DNA sequences?
Is understanding protein folding and protein to protein interaction the holy grail of making massive improvements in molecular biology? What are the big unsolved problems?
Like if we know the virus’s DNA and it’s 3D protein architecture, we can solve for antigen proteins in a computer that outputs possible DNA sequences and we can manufacture them the next day in a protein printer. How far away are we to that future?
Yes
"The antigen is also a protein, I assume the DNA sequence for it is well known. Right?"
Yes
"How far are we in terms of tech to print custom proteins from arbitrary DNA sequences?"
Generally that is something a first year graduate student can accomplish.
"Is understanding protein folding and protein to protein interaction the holy grail of making massive improvements in molecular biology? What are the big unsolved problems?"
There are too many unsolved problems to count. There have been great advances lately in de novo prediction of protein folding and to a lesser extent protein:protein interactions. But even if you had perfect knowledge of all that, you still can't just like design the perfect vaccine.
"Like if we know the virus’s DNA and it’s 3D protein architecture, we can solve for antigen proteins in a computer that outputs possible DNA sequences and we can manufacture them the next day in a protein printer. How far away are we to that future?"
We (the world) accomplished that within a couple of weeks of identifying the COVID virus.
Sounds like a manual software testing. What are the chances of automating entire process? Whenever I see bio/chemists working it seems very manual job. I assume someone already tried it, but perhaps only for specific area rather than making universal robot?
They are produced in various biological systems, with nature doing the synthesis. As far as I understand you can scale that up reasonably well with some effort.
Indeed, I'm not sure it's out-of-scope for 2020-era technology.
Apparently it's grown quite a bit since I've spoken to my friend. When we last checked in, it was a little startup. Now, it's a $2.4 billion dollar operation. I guess my friend is probably worth a few hundred million right now.
It has value, but there are usually better treatments available that more broadly fight a variety of viruses and don't need to be so specifically customized as an antibody.
However, right now we have humans synthesizing large amounts of antibodies that are proven to work (because the humans creating them survived and cleared the virus). It may ultimately be faster to isolate antibodies from the serum and engineer cell cultures (through adding DNA to them, "recombinant DNA") to create more of those antibodies, resulting in much stronger synthesis of a single antibody (so-called "monoclonal antibody drugs").
It's nearly certain that both of these are happening many times over around the world right now. All of the science here was already in lab use the first time I worked in a bio lab in 2003, and nowadays we have methods that didn't exist then (such as CRISPR for DNA manipulation and fast sequencing of both nucleic acids and proteins).