They used antibodies directed against cytokine proteins (also known as interleukins) to dampen the inflammatory response run amok, the so-called cytokine storm. These antibodies were already approved treatments before the pandemic.
"Instead of attacking the virus, the monoclonal antibodies calm down the body's inflammatory response.
"They're actually directed against certain parts of the immune system that contribute to this overactive response to the virus' invasion," Jeanfreau said."
That other link to the paper in Nature was good. This link is to a local Faux News TV report. IMO, they're not such a good source.
That's what I get for not reading the news blurb carefully.
I have not found a lot of information online about the difficulties in getting antibody drugs tested and in production, but the following article provides some information, albeit slightly dated:
>>>Scientists are scrambling to find powerful antibodies that can turn back the disease. But can they manufacture enough for everyone? . . .
There is intense pressure to accelerate the drugs’ development—to take corners at high speed, if not cut them altogether. But some experts say it’s not necessary to skip steps, something that could doom a drug later on. Instead, Ebola showed it’s partly a matter of spending 10 times the money to go twice as fast. “You don’t throw out the rules, but you shorten all the steps,” says Myron Levine, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Maryland, who has trained teams in Africa to run vaccine trials. “An accordion when extended is quite wide, but you push it together and it’s short. You don’t skip steps; you squeeze the accordion.” . . .
If the pandemic continues to grow, anyone who discovers a new treatment will be hard pressed to make enough of it. That’s especially true for antibodies.
During the
Ebola trial, each subject got doses as high as 150 milligrams per kilo of body weight—or about 10 grams in all. If a covid-19 antibody is created, millions of people could need it. That means antibodies would need to be manufactured literally by the ton, in a process that involves skimming the molecules from tanks of living cells and drying them into a powder. But the biomanufacturing industry has never been asked to create that much of anything. If there’s an antibody Manhattan Project, it would be to build factories big enough for the job.
The largest biomanufacturing facilities in the world cost $1 billion to set up and have as much as 150,000 liters of broths bubbling at once. Carnley Norman, a vice president of manufacturing at KBI Biopharma, which produces antibodies, estimates that one such megafactory might be able to make enough antibody for a million people each year. But what if we needed to treat 10 or 100 million—and what if high doses of several different antibodies were required? At the high end, Norman’s calculation then becomes staggering: we’d need more than 300 such plants, more than exist in the world today. . . .
But all that’s only if we get a drug. And some believe the path to an antibody, like the path to a vaccine, is probably going to be difficult. “We have to worry about the efficacy and the safety, because this virus has unique features,” says Liusong Yin, who heads discovery of biological drugs at
GenScript, a Chinese research company that has 50 people doing antibody screening. He says if the virus mutates, stopping it will demand more complex antibody cocktails that hit it in three or four places at once. And for severe cases, he worries, antibodies can sometimes make people sicker by contributing to a storm of immune activity. <<<
Scientists are scrambling to find powerful antibodies that can turn back the disease. But can they manufacture enough for everyone?
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