US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — Researchers from Peking University are developing such a medicine: according to them, the test drug can not only reduce the recovery time of infected people, but even provide short-term immunity from the virus. An article about this is published in the publication Cell.
Xiaoliang Xie, director of Peking University Advanced Genomics Innovation Center, said in an interview with AFP that the drug had successfully passed the animal testing stage. The basis of the development is a unicellular genomic approach, which helped to efficiently find a neutralizing antibody.
“When we injected neutralizing antibodies into infected mice, five days later, the viral load decreased by 2,500 times,” says Ce. “So this potential drug has a therapeutic effect.”
The drug uses neutralizing antibodies that are produced by the human immune system to prevent cell virus infection. These antibodies Xie team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients.
The authors in their article argue that the use of antibodies provides a potential “cure” for the disease and reduces recovery time. Scientists believe that the drug should be ready for use in humans this year, and it can be used on a large scale by the time of the alleged winter outbreak of Covid-19.
Clinical trials will take place in Australia and other countries: in China itself there are too few new cases of coronavirus infection, so it will be difficult to correctly select a sample of subjects. Scientists hope that the drug can actually become that specialized medicine that will stop the pandemic.
At the same time, more than 100 vaccines for Covid-19 are already under development in the world . In China alone, five potential coronavirus vaccines are undergoing human trials. However, despite the fact that several countries have reached this stage, the World Health Organization warns that the development of a working vaccine may take from 12 to 18 months.
Blood plasma from recovered people who have developed antibodies to the virus that allow the body’s defenses to attack it is another way that, according to the Chinese authorities, showed “very good therapeutic effects.” However, plasma in the required volumes is more difficult to obtain than the isolated antibodies.
The authors note that on model animals (mice) even managed to demonstrate short-term protection against the virus. If a neutralizing antibody was introduced before the mice were infected with the virus, they were not subsequently infected. This could help medical workers by providing them with temporary protection for several weeks – and in the future, if they can improve the drug, for several months.
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