
A human monoclonal 1 antibody blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection - TeeWEE
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987958v1
======
Vinnl
Note that this is a Dutch news channel, and the article is in Dutch.

Usually, when they report on a discovery done by Dutch researchers, it is
considered newsworthy because the researchers are Dutch, not because the
research itself is particularly noteworthy. So in addition to the usual
reservations that one should have when noteworthy discoveries make the news,
there's an extra reason not to hold your breath until you see this appear in
international publications as well.

~~~
Fnoord
> Usually, when they report on a discovery done by Dutch researchers, it is
> considered newsworthy because the researchers are Dutch, not because the
> research itself is particularly noteworthy.

"Usually"? Do you have examples?

~~~
Vinnl
Just consider how many of these articles made international news, even though
the research theoretically applies internationally:
[https://nos.nl/zoeken/?q=%22Nederlandse+onderzoekers%22](https://nos.nl/zoeken/?q=%22Nederlandse+onderzoekers%22)

~~~
Fnoord
That is just a generic search query. I checked the top 10 search results (in
two browsers). These were all internationally reported one, even specifically
on HN, or they're only locally relevant (such as who in NL won the Spinoza
award). Please link some specific examples.

~~~
Vinnl
Sorry, it's just an observation I've made over time, and I didn't save every
example I came across. If you want to see it for yourself, keep it in mind
when you come across news about Dutch researchers in Dutch news in the future.

~~~
Fnoord
I'll keep an eye on your hypothesis.

------
kokey
Monoclonal antibodies are difficult to produce at scale, that's why existing
therapies with these are so expensive.

~~~
dnhz
Or because biotech companies charge what insurance companies will bear for
them?

~~~
rumanator
> Or because biotech companies charge what insurance companies will bear for
> them?

Do you actually have any evidence that substantiates your claim? Wild
speculations and conspiracy theories should not have a place in discussions
regarding serious matters.

~~~
logicallee
Your tone is really weird. No conspiracy is required in the case of a single
company setting prices on its patented medical discoveries.

Since you're so critical of conspiracies, though, I'd (genuinely) love your
take on something that does require a conspiracy:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/cost-insurance-
di...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/cost-insurance-diabetes-
insulin.html)

(For me the Google amp link brought up the full article.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opin...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/cost-
insurance-diabetes-insulin.amp.html)

).

Without a conspiracy, what keeps any drug company from selling cheap generic
insulin in the United States?

The reason I ask is that I really don't think so many companies can cooperate
on price-fixing so I am looking for any other alternative explanation besides
an illegal price-fixing conspiracy which I think would be very difficult to
pull off among so many players and laws making it illegal.

But the comment you replied to isn't like that and doesn't require a
conspiracy.

~~~
cameldrv
You might be surprised:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-
fixing_conspira...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-
fixing_conspiracy)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/business/worldbusiness/12...](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/business/worldbusiness/12cartel.html)

[https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/igamisugaya_1...](https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/igamisugaya_170309_vitamincartels.pdf)

That’s just a few, and just the ones they caught. It’s very hard to prosecute
this case, and the incentive to collude is huge.

~~~
logicallee
Interesting links! Thank you.

------
archi42
For those who speak no dutch (neither do I), from what I understand the title
gives the most important point. The google translation also seems pretty good:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnos.nl%2Fartikel%2F2327076-wetenschappers-
rotterdam-en-utrecht-claimen-vondst-antilichaam-tegen-corona.html)

~~~
mmcnl
Side note: this translation by Google Translate is amazing. I am a native
Dutch speaker and the translation is 100% correct. I had no idea Google
Translate was this good.

~~~
rumanator
I wouldn't be surprised if high-volume translations weren't hand-tweaked by a
human to iron out mistranslations. In fact, I would be very surprised if
Google didn't had a human in the loop to handle these usecases. They already
rely on end-users to fix translation issues on their own.

~~~
archi42
Nope, I doubt that this translation is somehow more tweaked than other
translations: Last year around this time I was shopping to import a dutch car.
As a German native speaker I find dutch to be pretty well readable with some
practice, but I sometimes double checked on Google Translate - and the
translation were always excellent. (But reading Durch as a German is actually
quite funny, so I prefered that).

However, the user-supplied fixes have probably been a huge contributing factor
to getting the translations where they're today. And Googlers reviewing some
translations for their training data sets ;)

------
m00dy
Antibodies are special type of proteins that can connect to viruses. It
basically marks the virus so that immune system can shoot it down. Please let
me know if this is not correct.

~~~
agumonkey
I wonder if they wouldn't worsen the immune storm

~~~
danaris
This isn't Spanish Flu—there's no cytokine storm with COVID-19.

That's why the deaths are almost entirely the very old and immunocompromised.

~~~
newcrobuzon
> there's no cytokine storm with COVID-19.

Could you provide a source?

~~~
danaris
I don't know of anywhere that provides a comprehensive list of things COVID-19
isn't. Could you provide a source that suggests that there _is_ one?

Everything I've seen so far (eg, [0]) points to the virus itself damaging
respiratory tissue, and normal body immune response aggravating that locally
to some extent.

A cytokine storm [1] is, as I understand it, a massive _systemic_ immune
overreaction causing way too much inflammation, overwhelming the body all at
once.

That Wikipedia entry suggests that SARS may have caused a cytokine storm, at
least in some patients, but from it and everything I understand about the
phenomenon, it's recognizable in epidemiology largely by the greatly increased
incidence of deaths among young, healthy patients—which is not at all what we
see in COVID-19.

[0] [https://www.uticaod.com/zz/news/20200313/what-does-
coronavir...](https://www.uticaod.com/zz/news/20200313/what-does-coronavirus-
infection-do-inside-your-body)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_release_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_release_syndrome)

------
boshomi
bioRxive link:

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987958v1....](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987958v1.full.pdf+html)

~~~
ignoramous
r/covid19 link:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fietp4/dutch_erasm...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fietp4/dutch_erasmus_mc_finds_anti_body_research_is_up/)

A commentor posted English translation:

 _' Erasmus MC and Utrecht University find antibody against corona'

A group of ten scientists from the Erasmus Medical Center and Utrecht
University say they have found an antibody against the coronavirus, reports
Erasmus Magazine.

"To our knowledge, this is the very first antibody that we know blocks the
infection and there is a good chance that it will also become a drug on the
market," said Professor of Cell Biology Frank Grosveld. It has yet to be
tested on humans, which takes months.

The publication about the find is at the discretion of colleagues, after which
it may be published in the leading trade journal Nature. "Prevention is better
than cure, of course," says Grosveld. "A real solution is therefore a vaccine,
others are working on that. However, developing a vaccine takes two years."_

------
TeeWEE
This is the paper submitted for review
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987958v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987958v1)

If it passesthe review stage it will probably be published in the scientific
Journal Nature.

Note: this is not a vaccine. Its a treatment option for people who are already
sick.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Do you know how the timetable from Nature to patients would look compared to
the year+ being widely discussed for a vaccine?

~~~
janoc
It would likely go in parallel, that's why the paper is published on the
preprint server. Paper reviews in major journals like Nature can easily take
over a year but that is mostly to get the scientific "bragging rights" these
days. It has little effect on further research and drug development since the
information is out there already.

The part that is most relevant for the development of a new drug/treatment is
the safety and efficiency testing in the clinical studies - and that alone
will take many months. It can be shortened if it is a drug that has been used
before for something else (e.g. that chloroquine for malaria) and is only
repurposed because there we know the drug is safe already. For a completely
new drug it could take a year or more just to do the testing and get the
approvals.

So I wouldn't have high hopes to see this being deployed widely any time soon.

~~~
ericb
> For a completely new drug it could take a year or more just to do the
> testing and get the approvals.

> So I wouldn't have high hopes to see this being deployed widely any time
> soon.

I don't know, I mean, this is one of those things where compassionate use
seems likely? Won't we end up trying that and doing studies on them after?

~~~
janoc
You can't "do studies on them after". These aren't studies for the sake of
publishing papers but to determine whether or not the drug is safe to use and
whether it is actually effective.

If the drug or vaccine you are developing ends up killing more people than
saving it is not much of a cure, is it?

The same if the drug isn't effective - in that case it would be wasting
critical resources and probably causing the sick to not get a really effective
treatment.

That said, this process will be certainly sped up to maximum amount possible,
given the situation, but it will still take a long time.

~~~
ericb
You can. If you give it on a compassionate use basis to folks who are dying
and if 50% more live vs. comparables then there's your study.

------
blueboo
Let's say we discovered a cure. For simplicity's sake, this is a hypothetical
vaccine that instantly destroys the infection.

How long would it take for such a product to go from the lab to application in
the general population?--what are the key variables that factor into such an
estimate? Is there some expedited process in the case of a pandemic?

~~~
_ph_
This depends whether it is a "cure", that is a medicine to be given to the
people who are sick, or a vaccine, which is given to the general (healthy)
population.

For a medicine, a lot of the red tape can be cut, as you might test it on
otherwise hopeless cases. There is a limited risk associated (that one person
might die) and the results in the case it works are also easy to monitor.

With vaccines, things become complicated. \- vaccines are given to healthy
population, and to large parts of the population. So they need to be extremely
safe, or you end up killing more than the disease would have had. This is
obviously not acceptable and extensive safety testing needs to be done.

\- you need to find out, whether the vaccine works at all. Creating a working
vaccine against a virus like corona is very tricky - we don't for example have
a working vaccine against the cold. So making sure the vaccine has the
intended effect takes a long time, especially, if you consider that all tests
have to be done with healthy people.

So currently some antiviral medicine is being tested at sick people and some
results could be out soon, but for a vaccine, mid-2021 are the most optimistic
timelines I heard.

------
abhiminator
This is encouraging, but the key would be pushing this to clinical trials
ASAP.

Efforts need to be made to drastically trim the time-span it takes for a
successfully trialed COVID-19 vaccine to get from laboratories to hospitals
and into patient's veins.

I'm sure many countries and billion-dollar companies are at it, but making it
affordable to people who need it the most is a challenge in itself.

------
nobrains
A vaccine dose proactively creates memory cells (memory B cells) in the body,
which allow the body to IMMEDIATELY create fighter cells (plasma cells) when
the body is infected with the actual virus, thus stopping it in its tracks.
Without vaccine, when virus infects, the body takes times to learn the virus
and create the memory cells and fighter cells, and hence the infection gets
worse.

The weapons the fighter cells use are antibodies. In this case, the discovery
has directly produced antibodies, which are helpful in fighting the virus (but
cannot be used to proactively create memory cells). Antibodies have the
advantage that they don't trigger the body's immune system, which means less
issues to deal with.

Hope this (and other efforts being done) pass testing and get in the field as
soon as possible.

~~~
shawnz
Does this mean someone treated with antibodies won't be immune to the virus in
future?

~~~
sudhirj
Sounds like it. This is not a vaccination. It may be possible that while these
antibodies are working the body might also “learn” the virus, thus providing
immunity, but that would be a side effect of the infection.

~~~
nullc
For other coronaviruses that infect humans there the adaptive immune response
isn't particularly strong and doesn't last. E.g. immunity to HCoV-OC43 lasts
no more than about 12 months.

This is a reason to suspect that a vaccine may not be easily developed; so
antibody therapy (and/or anti-virals) might be the best we can do.

If the antibody therapy was highly effective and could be produced at scale
for a tolerable cost, it would probably be a pretty effective tool. Though
monoclonal antibodies aren't known for being particularly affordable.

------
H8crilA
The title is silly.

Of course antibodies exist against the virus - otherwise the fatality rate
would be 100%. You don't just survive an infection, your body creates
antibodies, and they stay in your body for a very very long time. That's the
whole point of vaccination.

Once this blows over I'll go get my blood tested for antibodies for the virus
- will be interesting to know if I had it.

~~~
guerrilla
Deducing that something exists and identifying something are two different
activities. The article is about the latter.

