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Drug being tested could help in Covid-19 recovery, say Chinese scientists
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.
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”.
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“If the Covid-19 epidemic reappears in the winter, our neutralising antibody might be available by that time,” Xie said in the statement.
“When we injected antibodies into infected mice, after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500,” Xie told the news agency AFP. “That means this potential drug has [a] therapeutic effect.”
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.
Antibodies have been successfully used in treating other viruses like HIV, Ebola and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Clinical trials in the US have showed Ebola drug Remdesivir shortened the recovery time in some Covid-19 patients by a third.
Over 100 vaccines for Covid-19 are in the works globally even as the World Health Organisation has cautioned developing one could take up to 18 months.
Three Covid-19 vaccines have entered phase II of clinical trials in Beijing, a municipal health official has said.
Separately, five innovative drugs have also been approved for clinical trials and all of them have entered phase II clinical studies, said Xu Qiang, the head of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission.
Beijing, Xu was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency, will accelerate the research and development of diagnostic reagents, drugs, vaccines and medical equipment and support pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturers in expanding their capacity to meet the increasing demands.
The second phase of the clinical trials is expected to be completed successively beginning in July
A total of 2,036 volunteer participants have been inoculated for the second phase of clinical trials and researchers are assessing whether or not the vaccines are safe and effective, Xinhua reported.
