(Photo: Unsplash)
Recently, Yan Jinghua's team at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a new fully-humanized monoclonal antibody against coronavirus, which was approved for clinical trials, according to the Beijing Daily.
The Phase I clinical trial will conduct dose exploration and safety validation in healthy humans.
This is the first therapeutic antibody approved for clinical trials of a novel coronavirus pneumonia drug in China, and the first in the world to be tested in a healthy population after completing non-human primate studies.
Yan Jinghua's team isolated and identified dozens of fully human antibody genes from patients who had been discharged from hospital after being cured of novel coronavirus pneumonia, and after repeated tests, they selected two strains of antibodies with high efficiency in neutralizing novel coronavirus activity in late February.
The results showed that the neutralizing antibodies effectively blocked the infection of the novel coronavirus, significantly reduced the load of the novel coronavirus in the respiratory tract of rhesus monkeys, and protected the lung damage caused by the virus infection.
The results of animal experiments provide a positive prospect for the further development of therapeutic antibody drugs against novel coronavirus pneumonia.
(Yan Jinghua's team. Photo from China Science Daily.)
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