Could a New Class of Antibodies Treat COVID-19 in a Manner That Avoids Resistance?
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Could a new class of antibodies treat COVID-19 in a manner that avoids resistance?:
One major avenue for COVID-19 drug development involves trying to reproduce our bodies' natural immune response. A number of pharmaceutical and biotech companies have been developing artificially-produced antibodies to serve as drugs to both treat COVID-19 and provide some temporary (weeks to months) protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection. There are many antibodies in clinical trials right now, most of which have a pretty obvious mechanism of action (manner in which they neutralize the virus): directly blocking the virus from binding to human cells. However, some of the antibodies in clinical trials do not have an easily explained mechanism of action, as they do not directly block viral entry. Intriguingly, they bind to a conserved region on the virus that may not be able to easily mutate, meaning these antibodies may still be effective even as the virus mutates.
As mentioned above, these antibodies that are currently under development aim to protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection by disrupting viral entry, but moving to a deeper level of how the things work: what do and don't we know about how these antibodies neutralize SARS-CoV-2?
Journal Reference:
Casalino L., Gaieb Z., Goldsmith, J.A., Beyond Shielding: The Roles of Glycans in the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein [open], ACS Central Science (DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.0c01056)
Christopher O. Barnes, Claudia A. Jette, Morgan E. Abernathy, et al. SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody structures inform therapeutic strategies [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2852-1)
Dora Pinto, Young-Jun Park, Martina Beltramello, et al. Cross-neutralization of SARS-CoV-2 by a human monoclonal SARS-CoV antibody [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2349-y)
Brooke E. Husic and Vijay S. Pande, Markov State Models: From an Art to a Science, (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b12191)
Lorenzo Casalino, et al,Beyond Shielding: The Roles of Glycans in the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein [open], ACS Central Science (DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.0c01056)
Christopher O. Barnes, Claudia A. Jette, Morgan E. Abernathy, et al. SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody structures inform therapeutic strategies [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2852-1)
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