One top scientist has just dropped a coronavirus bombshell.
Dr. Jacob Glanville, an immunologist and the CEO and co-founder of Distributed Bio, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Friday that his company has developed a potential new treatment for COVID-19 that could work faster — and better — than a vaccine.
The doctor explains
Glanville broke down his company’s latest development in an appearance on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. There, he explained that his company has “engineered neutralizing antibodies that go and block the virus,” Fox reported.
“The coronavirus, if you were to zoom in on it, you would see a series, a ring of spikes, and it uses those spikes to invade human cells. We’ve identified a series of super-potent antibodies that block those spikes and therefore make the virus no longer infectious,” Glanville said, according to Fox.
The doctor went on to explain that antibodies have been used to successfully combat a wide range of illnesses, including Ebola.
“This is the thing that turned the tide against Ebola,” Glanville said, according to Fox. “Ebola used to be a death sentence, about 50% mortality rate. And then, once a good antibody neutralizing solution was made, then I think 94% of people can walk away. So that transformed Ebola from a dangerous crisis to a manageable treatment.
“We’ve also got antibodies to treat rabies,” the immunologist added. “We’ve got antibodies to treat RSV in babies. Antibodies are used, too, for anti-venom. So this is an extremely well-established platform technology.”
“Every day counts”
Scientists have meanwhile been hard at work developing a vaccine for the coronavirus disease, which has already infected more than 330,000 and killed more than 9,500 in the U.S. alone, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker. But though Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has recently touted a vaccine that he claims will be the “ultimate game-changer” in the fight, he says public distribution of such a treatment is still a year — or more — away, CNBC notes.
According to Glanville, this is one of the other main advantages of his method: it’s faster.
“You can produce antibodies much faster than you can make a vaccine,” Glanville told Carlson, according to Fox. “And as I’d heard you mentioned previously on all that modeling, every day counts. We’re venting an incredible amount of money out of our economy and risking lives. And so you want to have a medicine as quickly as possible.”
What now?
According to Glanville, the next step for his antibody treatment is testing. He explained to Carlson:
Our next move is we hand this off to the U.S. military, a consortium from the Gates Foundation, and some private groups. And all of them are going to test the potency of neutralization of our therapeutic. We’re also working with Charles River Laboratories that runs safety…to make sure the stuff’s safe to put into people. And we’re going to go into a scaled up manufacturer. So at that point, what you do is you do a phase one last two human trial, and we’re aiming to do that toward the end of the summer, around August.
Glanville later told ABC that after testing, it’s just a matter of getting the treatment out there. “Our challenge is, right now, it’s a race against time to be able to manufacture them quickly enough and distribute them out to people who need them all over the world,” he said, according to ABC7 in San Francisco.
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