In a press release issued on September 16, 2020, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co. announced some encouraging preliminary results from an ongoing clinical trial of their antibody for treatment of COVID-19 disease. Is this the news we’ve been waiting so long to hear? Well…maybe.
So, let’s talk about antibodies. What are they? Antibodies are specialized proteins that are a major arm of our immune defense system.
In the case of viral infections, antibodies can lock onto the virus, block it from infecting cells and, eventually, remove it from circulation.
They can also detect cells that are already infected and destroy them so they don’t become a factory for producing new viruses.
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Antibodies are selective and recognize specific parts of the virus. They are made by the B-lymphocytes, or B-cells, which are a type of white blood cell.
When we get a viral, fungal or bacterial infection, the immune system throws everything including the kitchen sink at the invading organism.
The B-cells produce many different antibodies that target different parts of the virus. Some of these antibodies are weak and have no protective effect, but others hit the bullseye and can very effectively neutralize the virus and eliminate it. It would be great to capture these “super” antibodies.
We know that people can make highly effective antibodies against the Sars-2-coronavirus because most will recover from the infection.
We can measure coronavirus antibodies in the blood of people who have had the infection and recovered. We have even used antibodies collected from recovered patients to treat other sick people (called convalescent plasma), though it is not proven that this is an effective strategy.
It is no longer recommended. Scientists can collect antibodies from patients, isolate ones that are potent with strong, neutralizing capability and produce these selective, potent antibodies for clinical use.
The antibody used here came from the first US patients to recover from COVID-19. Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceuticals developed an antibody product, LY-Cov555, which was already demonstrated to be safe in humans from earlier studies.
In this current study, the product was compared at three different doses with individuals who received no treatment. It was studied in an outpatient setting for patients with symptomatic COVID-19.
The initial results were encouraging. They found that individuals receiving the LY-Cov555 antibody were 72% less likely to be hospitalized or have an emergency room admission than people who didn’t receive the antibody [1.7% (5/302 patients antibody) vs. 6% (9/150 patients placebo)].
It is important to note that in patients who received the antibody, there were significant reductions in the amount of coronavirus in the blood by three days after receiving the product—just as would be expected.
Fewer of these patients had high levels of the virus in their blood at later time points in the study, compared to the placebo group.
Fortunately, no patients in either group died, and all recovered. But, there are some unanswered questions that need to be addressed in continued studies, and the numbers of subjects studied so far are still small.
Also of significance to note is that there are low numbers of Blacks, Latinos and other people of color in the study; the very groups that fair the worst from COVID-19. So, there’s a lot more work to do to determine if this treatment can help us.
But as for right now, with the way things have been going, I’ll take this glimmer of hope and keep my fingers crossed.
