Belgian knife could be key to producing antibodies to neutralize Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus

The foil antibodies are a new clue to the fight against the coronavirus. A Belgian knife could be the key to producing an antibody to neutralize the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, reports courrierinternational.com, citing the South China Morning Post.

Called Winter, the blade grew near Ghent, Belgium, and developed antibodies against coronaviruses. Clinical trials are needed to see if these antibodies can be used in humans, but the team of American and Belgian scientists who isolated the antibodies said they were encouraged by their preliminary results, to be published in the scientific journal Cell next week. .

How it works The action of this antibody focuses on the “spikes” that we see on the surface of coronaviruses and, therefore, on the membrane of Sars-CoV-2, the new virus that causes Covid-19. These very specific protein “spikes”, called “spikes” (S), allow the virus to enter host cells to reproduce there. Specifically, they can serve as an “anchor” for the virus by binding to another protein outside of a cell that it will then infect.

Several recent studies show that in the case of Sars-CoV-2, these S proteins bind to human cell receptors with at least ten times greater force than S protein in Sars.

This is where the blade antibodies come into play. In fact, the immune system of llamas, and that of other camelid animals such as alpacas, produces two types of antibodies when they detect pathogens, one similar to human antibodies and the other, smaller, whose action on viruses. It is more specific. In fact, the antibodies produced by Winter have been shown to be effective in attacking the Sars virus protein, allowing it to bind to human cells.

In the first laboratory experiments, scientists discovered that this new antibody was effective in neutralizing a version of the Sars-CoV-2 virus.