According to Peking University researchers, we don’t need a vaccine to stop the coronavirus pandemic.
A drug is being tested to not only cut down the recovery time but also enable short term immunity from the virus to the infected. The drug has shown promising results during animal testing and now will be tested further for efficacy, revealed the researchers.
Sunney Xie, director of the university’s Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics, has said that the drug 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.”
The drug uses neutralising antibodies — produced by the human immune system to prevent the virus infecting cells — which Xie’s team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients.
A study on the team’s research, published Sunday in the scientific journal Cell, suggests that using the antibodies provides a potential “cure” for the disease and shortens recovery time.
Once taken, the drug makes use of neutralising antibodies, that are produced by the body’s immune system to restrict the virus infecting cells. The team managed to isolate these from the blood of 60 recovered patients, AFP stated.
The team’s expertise lies in single-cell genomics and they realised that the approach helped them find the neutralising antibody.
The drug is expected to hit the market later this year and will help combat the potential winter outbreak of the virus which is gripping the entire world.
More than 100 vaccines for COVID-19 are in the works globally, but as the process of vaccine development is more demanding, Xie is hoping that the new drug could be a faster and more efficient way to stop the global march of the coronavirus.
