Let’s face it: there will always be people skeptical about vaccines, and we’re not here to condemn nor to support them. That’s one of the reasons why developing treatments for COVID patients remains a great idea.
SciTechDaily.com brings great news for those willing to see another remedy against COVID: Sotrovimab is a new antibody therapy developed after a large study revealed a natural antibody called S309.
S309 shows great experimental results in neutralizing all known SARS-CoV-2 strains
The S309 antibody has even shown that it can neutralize new mutant strains that can escape from previous antibody therapies.
Back in May, the FDA even granted emergency use authorization for sotrovimab. The decision came after sotrovimab has proven during the trials to significantly reduce the hospitalization and death rates for those suffering from mild to moderate COVID illness.
Jay Nix, who is leader of the Molecular Biology Consortium that’s based at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) from Berkeley Lab, performed X-ray crystallography on samples from survivor-derived antibodies. The work of Nix, adding other cryo-electron and crystallography findings, led to generating of detailed structural maps of how the antibodies bind to the spike protein of the coronavirus. Therefore, the wider team was able to advance the most promising contenders to other studies.
Nix declared as quoted by SciTechDaily.com:
This antibody, which binds to a previously unknown site on the coronavirus spike protein, appears to neutralize all known sarbecoviruses – the genus of coronaviruses that cause respiratory infections in mammals,
And, due to the unique binding site on mutation-resistant part of the virus, it may well be more difficult for a new strain to escape.
Is the COVID pandemic finally approaching its end? We’ll never know for sure until it’s over.
The new study was published in Nature.
