“Monoclonals had their day, like the Model T or the biplane,” says Carl Dieffenbach, lead of the NIH’s Antiviral Program for Pandemics. But some doctors say the monoclonal treatments are still useful for treating a vulnerable population.
Not everyone entirely agrees. Monoclonals are still useful, some doctors say, for treating a vulnerable population.
“You and I and every human being that has a functioning immune system is walking around with probably trillions of totally different antibody molecules just circulating in our blood,” says Derek Lowe, a chemist and blogger for the journal Science, “Every one of us has a totally different suite of them. There are more of them than there are stars in the sky.”
The spike protein has been the target of all the monoclonal antibody treatments that go after the virus thus far. But it’s been a fickle soulmate, changing with new variants, leaving the monoclonal antibodies adrift in the bloodstream with nowhere to bind. is not susceptible to virus mutation because it targets the body’s immune reaction to the virus, rather than the virus itself.There might still be hope for monoclonals. Drugmakers and researchers at government agencies are now retooling the strategy, looking for monoclonal antibodies that could last.chief of the Antibody Biology Unit
The immune cells that react to several different coronaviruses are making antibodies that bind to a part of the spike protein that’s staying the same across them., finding the ones that make antibodies in response to various spike proteins — and then using those to make more antibodies that they can scale up, analyze and test, to figure out what on the virus they’re actually binding to. The process takes about three to four months each cycle, Tan says.
So while Tan and other researchers work on the next generation of monoclonal antibodies – ones that work well against all kinds of coronaviruses, maybe even future pandemic ones – the nation is entering a long lull with no monoclonal antibody treatments that work against dominant strains of SARS-CoV-2.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Over the pandemic, more than 3 million COVID patients have gotten infusions of antibodies to help keep them out of the hospital. Carl Dieffenbach, a top official with the National Institutes of Health, says that now with new immune-evasive COVID variants, these so-called monoclonal antibody treatments are out.
HUANG: Once they stick to their soulmate – in this case the SARS-CoV-2 virus – they tell the immune system to send reinforcements. Lowe says the most powerful antibodies can stop the virus in its tracks.
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