Scientist's COVID-19 Cure Breakthrough Could Be Available As Soon As September

With the rising number of COVID-19 cases around the world, we’re all waiting for scientists to come up with a solution to take down the novel coronavirus.?And while we do have some vaccines that seem to be ready, there is still time for them to be released to the world, subject to approvals by authorities.?

Among them is one researcher who claims to have found a way to activate our body's antibodies to take down the novel coronavirus in an instant.

Distributed Bio

Researcher Dr Jacob Glanville, who owns Distributed Bio, revealed in an interview with RNZ’s Checkpoint, saying, “I’m happy to report that my team has successfully taken five antibodies that back in 2002 were determined to bind and neutralise, block and stop the SARS virus.”?

He further added, “We've evolved them in our laboratory, so now they very vigorously block and stop the SARS CoV-2 [COVID-19] virus as well. This makes them suitable medicines that one could use once they've gone through human testing to treat the virus.”

In case you didn’t know, COVID-19 is slightly similar to SARS that wreaked havoc in China during 2002-2003. Scientists made hundreds of millions of versions of SARS antibodies and mutated them. In this pool then they looked for the ones that were easily able to take down COVID-19.

The antibodies bind on the exact spot where COVID-19 would normally attach to gain entry to our cells and prevent it from being infectious, thus not making us sick.

Reuters

Moreover, unlike vaccines, Antibodies can be given to a patient right away, according to? Dr Glanville. He said, “Antibodies are attractive because you can give them to a patient right when they're in the hospital like an antiviral. You can also give them to doctors, you could give them to the elderly people to prevent them from getting sick.”

These antibodies start working in a matter of minutes and can protect the consumer for around eight to ten weeks.

So does this mean we’ll get the medicine rolling soon?

The process isn’t as simple. They’re using manufacturing standards called GMP for producing the medicine that usually takes months. They’re currently waiting for the material to be ready post which they’ll go under human trial involving 400-600 people in hospitals and observe symptoms for 5 to 10 days.

He said, “Assuming that we're able to complete our study, at the end of summer, and it looks good, then we would use something called compassionate use. This is was used in the Ebola crisis. And it's been used in other cases where if you have something that's effective, and there's no other good medicine, you can begin releasing it to the world for use prior to going through all the approval process. That could be as early as September. Unfortunately, that's also as far away as September.”