Drugs made from antibodies are huge money-makers for some conditions — but they have gained little traction in infectious diseases, including COVID.
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The drugs rose to the occasion. By early November 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration had issued emergency-use authorization for the first antibody to treat COVID-19, which reached patients before any vaccines or other tailored antivirals. More followed, helping to save the lives of people with COVID-19 and even staving off infection in healthy recipients. When Casadevall’s cousin came down with COVID-19 last August, Casadevall helped to lobby his cousin’s doctor to prescribe an antibody.
Vaccines might be the ideal way to tackle a global pandemic — but they shouldn’t be the only one, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “It is really crucially important that we don’t pick one horse and bet on it. We need to bet on the entire field,” she says. Antibodies have some advantages over vaccines, such as providing lasting protection in people with weakened immune systems, she says.
Researchers worked out how to produce monoclonal antibodies en masse some 50 years ago, by cloning the cells that make them. Ever since, drug developers have been turning them into therapies, disarming human proteins involved in conditions such as autoimmune disorders, cancer, heart disease and migraines. Adalimumab, long the world’s top-selling drug, soothes rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune conditions by mopping up the inflammatory protein TNF-α.
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