Antibodies are our herbal reaction to infection. They can be taken from the blood of recovered patients or, fashion generation, manufactured synthetically in a laboratory.
The concept of using antibodies as a medical remedy dates back to the 1890s, when Emil von Behring effectively treated young people with a serious bacterial infection called diphtheria using serum containing antibodies from the blood of horses recently exposed to the same bacteria. first Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Nearly a century later, scientists Georges JFKohler and César Milstein learned to engineer cells that would produce many copies of an unmarried antibody that could be used to treat disease in the 1970s. These drugs, called monoclonal antibodies, use a higher number and antibody concentrate to attack a very fast target.
The first monoclonal antibody approved for kidney transplant rejection in the 1980s. By 2019, the Food and Drug Administration had approved 79 monoclonal antibodies.
“Antibodies are some of the most medicines in the world to treat everything from cancer to autoimmune diseases,” dr. Eline Luning Prak, professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Drugs, called “biological products,” treat a wide variety of diseases, from cancer to eczema and certain types of arthritis. Humira, the logo edition of a drug called adalimumab, was the best-selling drug in the world in 2018, with $19. 9 billion in sales to drug manufacturer AbbVie.
And last week, biotechnology company Regeneron, the same company that manufactures the drug Trump won, obtained FDA approval for the first Ebola treatment, Inmazeb, an addition of 3 monoclonal antibodies, which target parts of the external protein it uses to adhere to Ebola. and infect human cells.
For COVID-19, antibody drugs, all of which are still experimental and have not yet been shown to be effective, block the virus’s ability to stick to and infect cells in the body. in the overdue testing phase.
“These antibodies were designed to bind to very expressive sites in the complex protein SARS-CoV-2,” said Dr. Thomas Campbell, a physician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who runs the Colorado site for Regeneron’s COVID antibody. -19. remedy trials.
“It’s a way to protect yourself temporarily when you’re already in trouble,” Prak said. Medications are designed for patients who are already inflamed when the body does not have enough time to generate its own immune response.
Monoclonal antibody-based drugs are not the same as convalescence plasma: high-level coVID-19 experimental treatment; However, the remedies are similar, either they offer a shortcut to achieve the body’s herbal defense against a foreign invader, a concept called passive immunity.
Convalescent plasma is “an aggregate of loads or thousands of other antibodies” that target various sites of the virus, according to Prak. Monoclonal antibody remedies have a higher concentration of an unmarried express antibody, which makes the drug more potent than convalescent plasma.
These treatments, which are used for a wide variety of diseases, are not without threats. Depending on where the antibodies come in, drugs can produce other effects. The pharmaceutical company Genentech, for example, got rid of efalizumab, originally approved to treat psoriasis. because it was related to a threat of fatal brain infections in 2009.
Another company, Janssen, stopped making an antibody drug in 2010 due to serious side effects, some of which were life-threatening.
While artificial antibodies are being tested lately to save it from COVID-19, in addition to treating the disease, researchers still don’t know if this type of drug can repel the virus and say that even if it works, coverage will only last a short time.
“If they only last from several weeks to a month, they probably won’t be protective in six months or a year,” Campbell explained.
Alternatively, vaccines teach the framework to foreign invaders, such as the new coronavirus, and give the framework more lasting immunity.
But experts say monoclonal antibodies can simply be a “bridge” to a vaccine and work along with some other for the pandemic.
“The other people with the highest COVID threat are the ones who can simply organize poor responses to the vaccine,” Prak said. “Therefore, it is in this population that this type of treatment can be very useful. “
Miranda Rosenberg, M. D. , is a resident of dermatology at the University of Miami and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.
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