Drug being tested could help in Covid recovery, say Chinese scientists

BEIJING: A research team at a Beijing university has claimed to have successfully tested an experimental drug on animals that could shorten the recovery time for Covid-19 patients and offer short-term immunity to the pathogen, which has infected 4.8 million people globally and killed over 315,000 since originating in China late last year.

A Peking University statement said on Monday that the team led by Sunney Xie, the director of its Beijing Advanced Innovation Centre for Genomics, has “successfully identified multiple highly potent neutralising antibodies against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus of the respiratory disease COVID-19, from convalescent plasma [a blood fluid] by high-throughput single-cell sequencing”.

According to a study on the team’s research published on Sunday in the online medical journal Cell, the “potent neutralising antibody could be used to develop drugs for both therapeutic intervention and prophylactic [preventive] protection against SARS-CoV-2”.

“If the Covid-19 epidemic reappears in the winter, our neutralising antibody might be available by that time,” Xie said in the statement.

The drug uses neutralising 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.

Over 100 vaccines for Covid-19 are in the works globally.