Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, have developed a nasal spray to control synthetic antibodies, which they believe will help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
A team led by graduate student Michael Schoof has designed the synthetic molecules that “make the strip the crucial SARS-CoV-2 machine that can infect our cells with the virus,” according to a report on the website ‘ e university.
A paper posted on the preprint server bioRxiv says that experiments with the live virus show that the molecule is one of the most powerful COVID-19 antivirals yet discovered.
Although it is not a traditional vaccine, the researchers believe that one injection of the synthetic antibody, called “AeroNabs,” from a nasal spray a day as inhaled could provide protection against the deadly break until a vaccine becomes available, according to ABC 7 News.
“Because it’s so stable, we can actually place one of these, this is a bit of a nebulizer,” said Dr Aashish Manglik, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF, who added that the aerosolized agents trace back to a minuscule molecule that was first discovered in camels and similar animals, called a nanobody.
They are smaller than human antibodies, and can be manipulated to perform specific tasks. Like attaching themselves to the spike proteins on the coronavirus.
“It simply came to our notice then. It binds to one of these spike proteins and never releases, ‘said Manglik.
The researchers examined about 2 billion synthetic nanobodies before finding the best candidate, which they recreated to be even more powerful, the news report reported.
Knowing the coronavirus uses its spikes to attach itself to separate from the lung cells called an Ace2 receptor, they work to stop the invasion in their spores.
When the AeroNabs attach to the spike protein, the virus cannot bind to the receptor and thereby loses its ability to infect cells, ABC 7 News reported.
“Much more effective than portable forms of personal protective equipment, we think of AeroNabs as a molecular form of PPE that can serve as a major stopgap until faxes provide a more permanent solution to COVID-19,” said AeroNabs co-inventor Peter Walter, professor biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF.
For people who do not have access to or do not respond to coronavirus vaccines, Walter added, AeroNabs could be a more permanent line of defense against the disease.
Manglik, who frequently uses nanobodies in his research into the structure and function of proteins, said: “Although they function much like the antibodies found in the human immune system, nanobodies offer a number of unique benefits for effective therapies against SARS-CoV-2. . ”
The UCSF team is in talks with potential partners to increase production for clinical trials.
If successful, the researchers aim to make AeroNabs widely available as an inexpensive, widely available measure as a treatment against the coronavirus.
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