Nat Med: Monoclonal antibody therapy may be expected to help treat COVID-19.

September 16, 2020 // -- Based on the positive results of current preclinical studies, we have developed potential neutral antibodies that may be used as a potential therapy to help inhibit and treat COVID-19, according to a recent study by scientists from Vanderburg University and others, published in the international journal Nature Medicine.
Photo Source: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain, a monoclonal antibody isolated from the blood of a couple from Wuhan, China, who traveled to Toronto, Canada, in late January to be diagnosed with COVID-19 infection, were among the first confirmed COVID-19 patients in North America.
Over the past two years, researchers have developed an ultra-fast way to identify highly potential antiviral human monoclonal antibodies, while researchers have also validated them in small animals and non-human primates, all in less than three months.
paper, researchers reveal how they used this fast-track antibody discovery platform to isolate hundreds of human monoclonal antibodies that protect against surface prick proteins (S) that promote SARS-CoV-2 infections in lung cells.
researchers described how two antibodies, called COV2-2196 and COV2-2130, bind to different locations of the virus surface S protein, and how the combination therapy of the two antibodies helped reduce the viral burden in infected mice and protect them from weight loss and lung inflammation.
In addition, the researchers found that COV2-2196 and another potential antibody called COV2-2391 could protect rhesus monkeys from SARS-CoV-2 alone, and the results suggest that these monoclonal antibodies, whether single or combined, may be potential candidates for effective prevention or treatment of COVID-19 infection.
original source: Seth J. Zost et al. Rapid isolation and profiling of a diverse panel of human monoclonal antibodies targeting the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, Nature Medicine (2020). DOI:10.1038/s41591-020-0998-x.