This archive report was first published on 19 May 2020.
May 19, 2020 - The world has been racing to find treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus pandemic, which emerged in China late last year and has since spread across the globe, infecting over 4.8 million people and killing more than 315,000.
Researchers at Peking University's Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics have made a breakthrough in developing a drug that not only shortens the recovery time for those infected but also offers short-term immunity from the virus.
According to Sunney Xie, director of the university's Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics, the drug has been successful in animal testing, with neutralising antibodies reducing the viral load in infected mice by a factor of 2,500 after just five days.
“That means this potential drug has a therapeutic effect,” Xie said.
The drug uses neutralising antibodies produced by the human immune system to prevent the virus from infecting cells, which Xie's team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients.
A study on the team's research, published in the scientific journal Cell, suggests that using the antibodies provides a potential “cure” for the disease and shortens recovery time.
Planning for the clinical trial is underway, with the trial set to be carried out in Australia and other countries since cases have dwindled in China, offering fewer human guinea pigs for testing.
“The hope is these neutralising antibodies can become a specialised drug that would stop the pandemic,” Xie said.
