Interesting
Distributed Bio co-founder and CEO Dr. Jacob Glanville revealed on "The Story with Martha MacCallum" Thursday that his company's laboratory is 3 to 4 weeks away from completing the engineering on a treatment to combat the coronavirus.
www.foxnews.com
The TL:DR is, there are two good things here but some issues too, notably about time required to get these to doctors to help us. Probably a minimum of a year, but we have a lot of activity going on by the pharma research industry.
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Let's put this in perspective. The normal duration of a clinical trial process is ~ 9-10 years. They can shorten that considerably for an emergency situation, but probably not less than a year and that's only if the clinical trials are successful. It doesn't do us any good to give people a treatment for this virus, only to have the treatment itself cause people to get sick - and that can and does happen. This is the second group talking about clinical trials, the other is for a vaccine. They are similar in some respects, but there are differences between vaccines and antibody treatments, but they work in our favor - assuming everything works as hoped.
You don't usually give a vaccine to someone who's already sick. You give it to people to prevent them from getting sick. It is a little bit more complicated than that but you get the idea. For people who are already sick, a vaccine would just get lost in all of the other defences that are activated. The vaccine contains molecules that look like the virus, but are inactive. They teach the body what they can produce to identify and kill just the cells that have the disease. It's sometimes very effective, but it takes time.
You give an antibody treatment to people who are already sick. The idea is to get something into the body that already knows how to target and kill the viral infection. It may require several treatments to be effective. Then you might have to wait for a while before the patient can be given a vaccine, but if you can control contact with other infected people, the patient has a chance.
Expect more of these kind of announcements in the coming weeks. Virtually every large scale pharma company is working on it, and some small ones (like the one in the video) too.
This is amazing science btw. Our problem is, we don't exactly know a lot about how viruses, and antibodies work. Sometimes we get lucky though, and that's why there needs to be a bunch of these studies and trials going on.
