New drug can stop pandemic – scientists

BEIJING: A Chinese laboratory has been developing a drug it believes has the power to bring the coronavirus pandemic to a halt.

The outbreak first emerged in China late last year before spreading across the world, prompting an international race to find treatments and vaccines.

A drug being tested by scientists at

China’s prestigious Peking University could not only shorten the recovery time for those infected, but even offer short-term immunity from the virus, researchers said.

Sunney Xie, director of the university’s Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics, said the drug had been successful at the animal testing stage.

“When we injected neutralizing antibodies into infected mice, after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500,” said Xie.

“That means this potential drug has (a) therapeutic effect.”

The drug uses neutralizing antibodies — produced by the human immune system to prevent the virus infecting cells — which Xie’s team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients.

A study on the team’s research, published Sunday in the scientific journal Cell, suggests that using the antibodies provides a potential “cure” for the disease and shortens recovery time.

Xie said his team had been working “day and night” searching for the antibody.

“Our expertise is single-cell genomics rather than immunology or virology. When we realized that the single-cell genomic approach can effectively find the neutralizing antibody we were thrilled.”

He added that the drug should be ready for use later this year and in time for any potential winter outbreak of the virus, which has infected 4.8 million people around the world and killed more than 315,000.

“Planning for the clinical trial is underway,” said Xie, adding it would be carried out in Australia and other countries since

cases have dwindled in China, offering fewer human guinea pigs for testing.

China already has five potential coronavirus vaccines at the human trial stage, a health official said last week.

But the World Health Organization has warned that developing a vaccine could take 12 to 18 months.

Prevention and cure

Using antibodies in drug treatments is not a new approach, and it has been successful in treating several other viruses such as the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, Ebola, and Middle East respiratory syndrome or MERS.

Xie said his researchers had “an early start” since the outbreak started in China before spreading to other countries.

Ebola drug remdesivir was considered a hopeful early treatment for the coronavirus disease 2019 ( Covid- 19) — clinical trials in the US showed it shortened the recovery time in some patients by a third — but the difference in mortality rate was not significant.

The new drug could even offer short- term protection against the virus.

The study showed that if the neutralizing antibody was injected before the mice were infected with the virus, the mice stayed free of infection and no virus was detected.

This may offer temporary protection for medical workers for a few weeks, which Xie said they hoped to “extend to a few months.”

“We would be able to stop the pandemic with an effective drug, even without a vaccine,” he said.

Meanwhile, United States biotech firm Moderna reported promising early results on Monday from the first clinical tests of an experimental vaccine against the novel coronavirus performed on a small number of volunteers.

The Cambridge, Massachusettsbased company said the vaccine candidate, mRNA- 1273, appeared to produce an immune response in eight people who received it similar to that seen in people convalescing from the virus.

“These interim Phase 1 data, while early, demonstrate that vaccination with mRNA- 1273 elicits an immune response of the magnitude caused by natural infection,” said Moderna’s chief medical officer Tal Zaks.

“These data substantiate our belief that mRNA-1273 has the potential to prevent Covid-19 disease and advance our ability to select a dose for pivotal trials,” Zaks said.

US President Donald Trump welcomed the news. “It’s incredible what they can do and I’ve seen results. And the results are staggeringly good,” Trump told reporters. “So I’m very happy and the market’s up very big.”

Moderna, which was founded nine years ago, said the vaccine “was generally safe and well tolerated” and that patients suffered no more than redness or soreness from the shots.

In a conference call, Moderna chief executive Stephane Bancel said the preliminary tests inspired confidence that mRNA-1273 has “a high probability to provide protection” against the virus.

Separate tests performed on mice showed that the vaccine prevented the virus from replicating in their lungs, according to the company.

The US government has invested nearly half a billion dollars in the development of Moderna’s vaccine candidate.

It is being developed in a partnership with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease headed by Anthony Fauci and the clinical test was carried out by the National Institutes of Health.

Based on the Phase 1 partial results, Moderna said they would no longer study the highest dose since the lower doses appeared to provide some effect.

“The lower the dose, the more people we expect to be able to protect,” said Moderna president Stephen Hoge.