Antibody research is promising in the fight against COVID-19

Based on positive results in preclinical studies reported today, the potent neutralizing antibodies identified by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center show promise as a potential therapy for preventing and treating COVID-19.

The monoclonal antibodies were isolated from the blood of a couple from Wuhan, China, who were diagnosed with COVID-19 after traveling to Toronto, Canada, in late January. They were two of the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in North America.

Over the past two years, VUMC researchers led by James Crowe, Jr., MD, and Robert Carnahan, PhD, have developed blazing-fast methods to discover highly potent antiviral human monoclonal antibodies and validate their ability to protect small, non-human animals. primates, all in less than three months.

Reporting last week in the newspaper Natural medicine, researchers and colleagues across the country describe how they used this rapid antibody discovery platform to isolate hundreds of human monoclonal antibodies against the surface spike (S) protein that enables SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, infect lung cells.

In a separate report published today in the magazine Nature, VUMC scientists and colleagues describe how two of the antibodies, COV2-2196 and COV2-2130, bind to different sites on protein S and, either alone or in combination, reduce the viral “load” in infected mice and protect them from weight loss and lung inflammation.

They also discovered that COV2-2196 and another powerful antibody, COV2-2381, administered only rhesus macaques protected from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Taken together, these results suggest that these monoclonal antibodies, alone or in combination, “are promising candidates for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19,” the researchers concluded.

Last month, the global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca obtained a set of antibodies described in the Nature paper for clinical evaluation and development from Vanderbilt University. IDBiologics, a Nashville-based biotechnology firm, has licensed a separate set of antibodies. Both companies are planning clinical trials this summer.