Everyone’s talking about antibodies and how they might be used to diagnose, treat, and vaccinate us against COVID-19. And one biotech, Adaptive Biotechnologies, is researching the immune system to determine exactly how this virus affects us—and how we can use this knowledge to end the pandemic.
We still have big questions about the coronavirus. “Why do some healthy people who get infected with COVID have no symptoms, while others end up on respirators? Why are most kids immune but a few have strokes?” BIO President and CEO Jim Greenwood asks on the latest episode of the I AM BIO Podcast.
One biotech thinks they might be able to find some of the answers. “Some people are genetically able to attack exactly the right part of the virus,” an evolutionary response “to protect our population against complete annihilation from a virus,” said Dr. Harlan Robins, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Adaptive Biotechnologies.
This is why we see such wildly disparate responses among people who are infected—and it’s totally random.
So, this is what Adaptive Biotechnologies is looking into. They’re mapping the specific T-cells that fight the virus to determine the exact immune response on a large scale.
They’ve launched a massive, open-access study called immuneRACE, which will study the impact of the virus on the immune system in more than 1,000 people. They expect to start releasing data to the public as early as June.
The end result could be a third type of diagnostic, allowing doctors to detect the disease early and identify asymptomatic patients by looking at the immune response, and even send people to the hospital who are at the greatest risk of complications before they get very sick.
Adaptive Biotechnologies has partnered with Amgen, another BIO member, to discover and develop antibody therapies and search for “the Michael Jordan of antibodies,” said Dr. Robins.
Dr. Robins expects they’ll find the signal for diagnostics in a matter of weeks, and with Amgen’s help, be able to commercialize it quickly. The biggest question will be regulation, and how quickly they can get approval to market the test.
This technology could help us prepare for future pandemics, too. A worldwide surveillance system to tracking “novel immune responses”—like the unusual pneumonia-like cases that popped up in Wuhan at the end of last year—could allow us to track and respond to pandemics sooner.
Listen to the whole thing to learn more about how your body develops antibodies, what makes the novel coronavirus different from the common cold, and why the immune system is a “shockingly hard thing to measure.”
Get the podcast at www.bio.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcast fix, including Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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STAT: Trump administration outlines audacious plan to deliver ‘hundreds of millions’ of COVID-19 vaccine doses by end of 2020
“The project will rely in part on allowing drug manufacturers to begin scaling up their manufacturing efforts prior to receiving approvals regarding a potential vaccine’s effectiveness, officials said.”
