How a secretive Pentagon agency seeded the ground for a rapid coronavirus cure

[rangerrebew]

How a secretive Pentagon agency seeded the ground for a rapid coronavirus cure
 
By
Paul Sonne
July 30, 2020 at 9:22 p.m. EDT

The scientists were working through the night over a weekend in February in their Vancouver offices, running a blood sample from an early American covid-19 survivor through a credit card-sized device made up of 200,000 tiny chambers, hoping to help save the world.

Their mission was part of a program under the Pentagon’s secretive technology research agency. The goal: to find a way to produce antibodies for any virus in the world within 60 days of collecting a blood sample from a survivor.

Established years before the current pandemic, the program was halfway done when the first case of the novel coronavirus arrived in the United States early this year. But everyone involved in the effort by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) knew their time had come ahead of schedule.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/how-a-secretive-pentagon-agency-seeded-the-ground-for-a-rapid-coronavirus-cure/2020/07/30/ad1853c4-c778-11ea-a9d3-74640f25b953_story.html

[PeteS in CA]

IEEE Specrum had general news of this in March, 2020, https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/bionics/darpas-firebreak-treatment-for-the-coronavirus :

DARPA Races To Create a “Firebreak” Treatment for the Coronavirus

When DARPA launched its Pandemic Preparedness Platform (P3) program two years ago, the pandemic was theoretical. It seemed like a prudent idea to develop a quick response to emerging infectious diseases. Researchers working under the program sought ways to confer instant (but short-term) protection from a dangerous virus or bacteria.

Today, as the novel coronavirus causes a skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases around the world, the researchers are racing to apply their experimental techniques to a true pandemic playing out in real time. “Right now, they have one shot on goal,” says DARPA program manager Amy Jenkins. “We’re really hoping it works.”
...
Robert Carnahan, who works with Crowe at the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center ...
...
Jenkins says that all of the P3 groups (the others are Greg Semposki’s lab at Duke University, a small Vancouver company called AbCellera, and the big pharma company AstraZeneca) have made great strides in technologies that rapidly identify promising antibodies. ...
...
Moderna was involved in a related DARPA program known as ADEPT that has since ended. The company’s work on mRNA-based therapies has led it in another interesting direction—last week, the company made news with its announcement that it was testing an mRNA-based vaccine for the coronavirus.

Putting the two articles' info together, DARPA was working on vaccines in January 2020 as part of a program launched under Trump in 2017 and begun in 2018. AstraZeneca and Moderna are two of the three companies whose vaccines are in Phase III testing. AbCellera is partnered with Eli Lilly, and their antibody treatment is in Phase I testing, https://www.abcellera.com/news/2020-06-01-worlds-first-covid-19-clinical-trial-for-a-potential-monoclonal-antibody-treatment .

But Trump did nothing for the two months of January and February. But it's nice to see the NYT catching up to what IEEE Spectrum reported 5 months earlier.

[PeteS in CA]

And even more about this, https://www.abcellera.com/news/2020-01-abcellera-mobilizing-a-response-to-novel-coronavirus :

AbCellera is mobilizing a response to the novel coronavirus outbreak as part of its DARPA P3 program

JANUARY 28, 2020
AbCellera confirms that it is mobilizing its pandemic response platform against the ongoing outbreak of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) originating in Wuhan, China. Since 2018, under the DARPA Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, AbCellera has been leading a team of partners to establish a robust technology platform for pandemic response capable of developing field-ready medical countermeasures within 60 days of isolation of an unknown viral pathogen. AbCellera’s rapid, high-throughput therapeutic antibody discovery technology will be used to discover coronavirus-neutralizing antibodies that could ultimately be deployed to stop transmission of the 2019-nCoV outbreak.

If I understand correctly, this is a treatment, not a vaccine. But instead of hindering infection spread as HCQ does, it would provide antibodies to fight this coronavirus that a patient's body has not yet "learned" to make.