JoNova 8/18/2020
The “Aeronabs†are on the way?
Right now there are more biomedical research teams focused on one problem than at any point in history, and they are armed. This is Biotech’s Big Moment, and here’s just another potential game changer. The time line here is short, and the ability to scale it is large. The seige of 2020 will end one way or another, and we will gain a whole set of tools to use on other viruses too.
If the virus has a key to get into our cells, this is like making millions of decoy locks that stick to the keys and thus disable them.
What if we could coat our lungs with tiny particles that work like PPE against coronavirus? The aim here is that one nasal spray a day might stop the virus getting entry into our cells. At the moment, one team have this working in the lab already. They’ve
created a kind of cut down mini antibody, and at this stage it sticks like glue to the viral spikes. It still needs to be tested in humans, and might yet fall in a hole. But it’s another example of the potential contained in molecular engineering on a scale like we’ve never done before. And we know something like this works in Camels, Alpaca’s and Llama’s, because that’s where the inspiration came from — so it’s not entirely crazy.
Perhaps we’ll just “spray up†for holidays and parties?
The numbers involved in just this one research project are boggling. The team at UCSF started out with two billion different nanobodies and screened them down to nine that stick to the hot-money part of the Covid spikes — the key that opens a lock on the outside of your cells (called the ACE2 receptor). The idea is that any Sars Cov-2 viruses rolling around in your lungs will get coated with these little molecules and thus spin on uselessly for days afterwards, unable to use their keys to get in to your cells. The coated virus will get broken down eventually, as all viruses do when they can’t engage and use host machinery.
More:
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/08/how-about-a-nasal-spray-of-nanobodies-smaller-faster-and-cheaper-than-antibodies/Error 404 (Not Found)!!1
