Current monoclonal antibodies fail against COVID virus variants, so drugmakers want to use a fast-track test for new ones
Aaron Glatt recalls one of the first times he used monoclonal antibodies to help a patient with COVID. It was November 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, and “before then there hadn’t really been drugs we could use to treat people with early-onset illness,” says Glatt, an infectious disease physician at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside, N.Y. His patient, an elderly woman, was coughing and weak.
Monoclonal antibodies, or mAbs, are critical therapies for millions of people with immune system problems, who are at high risk of infection because their body does not respond effectively to vaccines. Organ transplant recipients and cancer patients treated with immune-suppressing drugs, for instance, “can't lead normal lives for fear of COVID,” says Myron Cohen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.
During a December workshop co-hosted by the FDA and the European Medicines Agency, many scientists argued in favor of a quicker testing strategy called immunobridging. The idea is to show that new mAbs neutralize current variants in the lab at least as well as older mAbs vanquished earlier variants.
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