With no vaccine expected anytime soon, treatments are crucial to saving the lives of thousands of the infected, especially high-risk patients.
MILWAUKEE, Wis. – In a week when the coronavirus closures and quarantines hit like falling dominoes – the lockdown in Italy, the empty workplaces and college campuses in the U.S., suspended sports seasons, canceled festivals – far less attention fell on the global scientific community's drive to find treatments for the new virus., which is marked by fever, coughing and difficulty breathing. One treatment could be just weeks away.
The use of survivor antibodies, serum therapy, dates back to 1891 when it was used successfully to treat a child with diphtheria. Since then, serum from recovered patients has been used"to stem outbreaks of viral diseases such as poliomyelitis, measles, mumps and influenza," according to a paper Friday in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Collecting large amounts of serum from recovered patients could be a sizable task. It could turn out that serum from one recovered patient is only enough to save a single sick one, explained Kruse at Johns Hopkins."It's a logistical challenge to put it together, but at the very least there are no hurdles to producing the therapy."His method seeks to take advantage of the new coronavirus' ability to latch onto and enter cells.
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