In the pursuit of coming up with a way to defeat the novel Coronavirus, scientists have identified multiple antibodies from COVID-19 patients.?
Discovered using a single-cell analysis method, these antibodies could possibly neutralise the virus in a human body.
A new study published in the journal Cell uses high-throughput single-cell genome sequencing for identifying the antibodies from convalescent plasma, a component of patients¡¯ blood. Scientists in the study note that such antibodies can be successfully used to treat viruses like Ebola, AIDS, and MERS.
The study has been conducted by Sunney Xie, a noted Chinese American biochemist and the director of the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics at Peking University, and his team. Xie is widely considered to be the founding father of single-molecule biophysical chemistry and single-molecule enzymology.
Xie told AFP that the drug resulting from the studies has been successful at the animal testing stage. ¡°When we injected neutralising antibodies into infected mice, after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500," said Xie. "That means this potential drug has (a) therapeutic effect," he added.
The drug is based on a recovering patients¡¯ plasma that contains neutralising antibodies produced naturally by the immune response. Xie's team isolated these antibodies from the blood of 60 recovered patients. The use of the resulting drug has led to a clear improvement of both mild and severe COVID-19 patients, the study notes.
This process of isolation of antibodies, however, is a slow and tedious process. Scientists have to screen for monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) - potent neutralising molecules from the immune system¡¯s B cells. The existing methods for this, as per the study, are not an ideal response for a global health emergency.
This is because only some B cells produce antibodies that are capable of neutralising the virus. The researchers, hence, call for a more rapid process to screen for those cells for the required immune molecules.
That is exactly what the study is aimed at. In the study, researchers demonstrated a rapid and efficient single-cell genome sequencing method to identify specific B cells that produce SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibodies in recovering COVID-19 patients.
¡°We showed that high-throughput single-cell sequencing could lead to the identification of highly potent neutralizing mAbs that have strong therapeutic and prophylactic efficacy,¡± the scientists noted in the study.
The antibodies identified through this process were then tested and it turned out that they could indeed neutralise the virus. Clinical trials for the same are now underway.