Your immune system, particularly your T-cells, recognizes toxic intruders and hopefully develops the right antibody to neutralize the invaders. Typically, where that nasty invader attaches itself to vulnerable parts of your body as its mechanism of survival and reproduction, your immune system seeks to create the right antibody, a protein that itself attached to the intruder, making it difficult to make that hostile attachment. It may form a coating (or other blocking agent, partial or total) against the intruding toxin. But a viral toxin can evolve to circumvent, delay or completely be resistant to your body’s particular ability to create the right antibody. And for serious infections, the inability to create a sufficient antibody (or respond quickly enough; it can take a lot of time) can be exceptionally destructive and even fatal.
CombatCovid.HHS.gov explains how a new generation of manmade antibodies – often based on antibodies generated by patients who have survived the relevant infection – can be used to treat those who are infected or likely to become infected with a particularly virulent virus: “Your body naturally makes antibodies to fight infection. However, your body may not have antibodies designed to recognize a novel (or new) virus like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Monoclonal antibodies, or mAbs, are made in a laboratory to fight a particular infection—in this case, SARS-CoV-2—and are given to patients directly with an infusion. That’s why mAb treatment may help patients who are at high risk for severe symptoms or having to be hospitalized.
“mAb treatment for COVID-19 is different from a COVID-19 vaccine. A vaccine triggers your body’s natural immune response, but can take weeks to develop enough antibodies and prevent some kinds of infection. Some vaccines for COVID-19 require two shots, so your body can develop its own immune response to the disease. But if you already have the virus, mAb treatment gives your body the antibodies it needs to protect itself.”
Unlike the relatively short/minimal clinical testing time required for the preventative mRNA vaccines (e.g., Moderna and BionTech-Pfizer), which are simply manmade proteins with a gene-spliced virus lookalike segment attached (which can teach your immune system to recognize a viral intruder and slowly develop internally its own antibody), the development and testing of these monoclonal antibodies takes a lot more time. As we hear that even in the United States, because of widespread and unjustified fear and resistance to the anti-COVID vaccines mostly based on stubborn mythology and the politization of a medical reality, we are unlikely to achieve that cherished “herd immunity” – that magical penetration of recovered patients and vaccinated people that literally causes a disease to fade away (usually close to 80% of the relevant population). And that reality shifts to a second question: is there an effective use of these manmade antibodies to treat the COVID-19?
If you recall, when President Trump was severely infected with what might have otherwise been a fatal COVID-19 attack, he was accorded an exemption to be treated with a monoclonal antibody cocktail that was still in its testing stage and manufactured by Regeneron. That treatment undoubtedly saved his life, it is worth exploring exactly how that antibody cocktail was developed and how it works. Writing for the May 4th FastCompany.com, journalist Kristin Toussaint explains:
In early December 2019, Alina Baum, associate director of the infectious disease group at biotech company Regeneron, saw ‘rumblings’ of what was to come. There was ominous news of an illness in China, and it was hard to tell what might come next. Often, such viruses go away, but as weeks went by, it was clear SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, would not. Baum and her team didn’t want to wait until it had already become a global pandemic: As soon as the coronavirus genome sequence was made public, in January, they began working on a treatment: ‘We said, ‘Okay, we have these rapid response capabilities—we’re going to swing into action,’ ’ Baum says.
“Within weeks, the coronavirus crisis was underway, and so was the Regeneron team. ‘There was a shared sense of urgency across the entire company,’ Baum says, with dozens of groups at Regeneron working together. These teams have experience with infectious diseases: Regeneron created the first drug to treat Ebola patients and developed an antibody treatment for MERS, among other pharmaceutical developments. In just 10 months, Regeneron created a COVID-19 antibody cocktail that was granted FDA emergency use authorization…
“From the start, Regeneron set out to make a ‘cocktail’ of antibodies—meaning more than just one antibody as the therapeutic agent. Antibodies are the proteins our bodies produce when a virus, bacteria, or other infection attacks our immune system. Antibodies bind to certain parts of those intruders, which can prevent them from entering our cells and spreading the virus, or can target them for an immune-system response. ‘We know that viruses mutate. We know that it’s much easier for a virus to acquire a mutation that will impact one antibody versus two antibodies,’ Baum says of the decision to create a cocktail.
“Called REGEN-COV, the cocktail came from two discoveries: One of the antibodies was found by studying the plasma of a COVID-19 survivor, and the other was discovered by introducing a pseudo-version of the virus (created by using that genome sequence) to special Regeneron mice that have human immune systems and so produce fully human antibodies. The treatment—which is administered intravenously—also uses two antibodies that bind to ‘completely different regions’ of the viral protein, which makes it harder for the virus to escape those antibodies, and thus that drug. The team still tested other possibilities—one antibody, two that overlap, and two that bind to different regions—to confirm their decision, and within 10 months, the antibody cocktail went from early-stage research to FDA emergency use authorization in November 2020...
“Regeneron recently completed a phase 3 clinical trial that showed its antibody cocktail reduced COVID-19-related deaths and hospitalization by 70% in non-hospitalized patients. Tens of thousands of patients have benefited from the antibody cocktail’s emergency use authorization, and 25,000 people have participated in the clinical trials.” Nevertheless, the development and testing process is expensive plus the cost of manufacturing is complex. We’re not sure if this treatment can be sufficiently deployed to make up for the inability to achieve herd immunity, but at least we will soon have a treatment that can reduce the severity of the symptoms and usually avoid a fatal end result. We are likely, however, to have to deal with COVID-19 much longer than most of us ever anticipated.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it would be a whole lot easier and cost efficient, the pandemic would end sooner and normality could resume more rapidly, if the vaccine skeptics would keep in mind that it is not just their own bodies they are dealing with… but the ability to defeat this awful disease by not spreading it to others.
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