4 ms·
This is very far away from a cure. The team does not even appear to have done animal efficacy studies, never mind the usual animal tox studies: > We are sendin
by aazaa 7y ago
This is very far away from a cure. The team does not even appear to have done animal efficacy studies, never mind the usual animal tox studies:
> We are sending [the antibodies] to the military for confirmation testing and to Charles River Laboratories for safety and tox characterization.
The article does a very poor job of conveying just how far away this is from a cure. More likely than not, it will fall out either due to tox or low efficacy before it even gets to Phase 1.
- gnicholas 7y agoWhy would it fail due to tox if it's an adaptation of something that worked on SARS in 2002? > We took a series of five antibodies from around 2002 that were able to neutralize SARS EDIT: maybe instead of downvoting you could explain your thinking?
- s1artibartfast 7y agoThere is no indication that the technology they are leveraging was ever tested in a meaningful way and drug development is hard. Finding an antigen that binds to the virus is the relatively easy part. Finding one that is safe and manufacture-able is the hard part. The link below[1] describes this process for a small molecule chemical compounds and gives a success rate of 5000:1. Distributed Bio is at the very beginning of this process, and is working with a large molecule, which is vastly more complex. The researchers are at step zero of a complex process which can take 12–15 years and cost in excess of $1 billion [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_to_lead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_to_lead [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3058157/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3058157/