Novel coronavirus pneumonia victims worldwide have reached 3.11 million, but there is no specific drug or vaccine for humans to deal with it.
In China, the first vaccines have entered Phase II clinical trial. Now, a breakthrough has been made in the development of potent drugs.
The drug developed by the Peking University team is expected to be available within the year, and preliminary results are said to be good.
Xie Xiaoliang, director of Peking University's Single Cell Genomics Laboratory, and his team have made significant progress on a new coronavirus pneumonia drug, and are the first in the world to apply high-throughput single cell sequencing technology to find neutralizing antibodies in the blood of recovering patients, reducing the search time from years to months, CCTV News reported.
Xie Xiaoliang said the neutralizing antibodies, in addition to promising to be therapeutically effective, could also provide short-term prevention to protect health care workers and patients' families, with an expiration date of about three weeks, potentially extending to three months with antibody modification.
The Xie Xiaoliang team has now identified 14 highly active neutralizing antibodies, from which they will look for the most desirable potent antibodies to make drugs.
Xie Xiaoliang said, "We are starting animal experiments and the initial results are good. If the epidemic were repeated over the winter, our neutralizing antibodies might have been available by then."
