"There is a cure"
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Let's see how well this ages.
A California-based biopharmaceutical company claims to have discovered an antibody that could shield the human body from the coronavirus and flush it out of a person’s system within four days, Fox News has exclusively learned.
Later Friday, Sorrento Therapeutics will announce their discovery of the STI-1499 antibody, which the San Diego company said can provide "100% inhibition" of COVID-19, adding that a treatment could be available months before a vaccine hits the market.
"We want to emphasize there is a cure. There is a solution that works 100 percent," Dr. Henry Ji, founder and CEO of Sorrento Therapeutics, told Fox News. "If we have the neutralizing antibody in your body, you don't need the social distancing. You can open up a society without fear..."
Some medical experts believe that while antibody research shows promise, there are concerns for how long the effects may last in fighting the virus in an infected patient.
“Antibodies, in general, have been very effective at bringing virus [levels] down if you’ve had a high burden of infection,” Phyllis Kanki, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a recent interview. “There are limitations to how much you can give and for how long.”
Officials for Sorrento Therapeutics believe they have found the key to a successful treatment.Through their studies, Sorrento screened and tested billions of antibodies they have collected over the past decade. They say this made it possible to identify hundreds of potential antibody candidates that could successfully bind themselves to the spike proteins of the coronavirus. They found that a dozen of these antibodies demonstrated the ability to block the spike proteins from attaching itself to the human enzyme ACE2, which is the receptor a virus normally uses to enter human cells.
Through further testing, the researchers at Sorrento found that there was one particular antibody that showed to be 100 percent effective in blocking COVID-19 from infecting health cells — STI-1499.
"When the antibody prevents a virus from entering a human cell, the virus cannot survive," Dr. Ji said. "If they cannot get into the cell, they cannot replicate. So it means that if we prevent the virus from getting the cell, the virus eventually dies out. The body clears out that virus."
"This puts its arms around the virus. It wraps around the virus and moves them out of the body."
Dr. Ji pointed out that the antibody can be used as preventative therapy since there are no side effects, and that it can be more effective than any vaccine that may be developed.
"This is the best solution," he said. "The point of making a vaccine is to generalize a neutralizing antibody. So, if you already have one, you don't need to the body to generate one from a vaccine. You've already provided it. You're cutting out the middleman."
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@Jolly said in "There is a cure":
Show me.
It's an interesting approach.
I'm gonna get all medical geeky here, so bear with me.
In the OR, we commonly use drugs that are muscle relaxants - they are not "relaxants" in the colloquial sense, they are paralytics. They work by preventing the muscle from contracting by blocking the receptor on the muscle that responds to the stimulus of the nerve connecting it. The nerve releases a chemical (acetylcholine) and if the receptor is blocked, the muscle won't contract.
For decades, the way to reverse the relaxant was to prevent the breakdown of the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine. As acetylcholine accumulates, it displaces the paralytic, and the muscle can resume normal function. We've done that since the 1960s.
And then, something new came along (this happened just as I retired). A new drug, suggamadex, became available. It has a totally different mechanism of action. This new drug "surrounds," the paralytic. By making the paralytic "bigger," it can't attach to the muscle receptor, rendering it ineffective.
This is, basically, the theory behind using the synthetic antibody on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You make it ineffective, and it's excreted.
Fascinating.
Like I said, let's see how it ages, but the theory makes sense.
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Ok...Chasing a different rabbit....Ever have a patient with an unknown pseudocholinesterase problem go wonky on you?
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Ok...Chasing a different rabbit....Ever have a patient with an unknown pseudocholinesterase problem go wonky on you?
@Jolly said in "There is a cure":
Ok...Chasing a different rabbit....Ever have a patient with an unknown pseudocholinesterase problem go wonky on you?
Only once. She spent a long long time in the
recovery roomPACU.This was in, yeah, I actually remember the case, 1976.
If you're interested, I'll post the details. It was a clusterfuck.
