Covid: Indian lab develops monoclonal antibody

Indian scientists have discovered a new monoclonal antibody against Covid-19 that gives protection against five Variants of Concerns of SARS-CoV-2, and five sub-lineages of the highly infectious Omicron that continues to infect a few thousand Indians daily.

Besides opening up a new treatment window against Covid-19, the discovery may help scientists design new vaccine candidates and create antibodies against possible new variants of SARS-CoV-2 as well as other new infections.

This is because the new antibody targets a unique portion of the virus that is highly conserved across a diverse spectrum of the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. In other words, this part of the pathogen has hardly changed even as the virus kept mutating.

Monoclonal antibody is a new class of therapy besides drugs and vaccines. It is an antibody (protein) produced from a cell line made by cloning a unique white blood cell.

"Unlike other monoclonal antibodies that target the (virus) areas that are hotspot for mutation, our monoclonal antibody attacks the proteins that remain same across SARS-CoV2 variants,” Anmol Chandele, a senior scientist at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, here and lead investigator of the project told DH.

Since it targets a highly conserved area on the outer surface of the receptor binding domain of the virus, the antibody is broad-spectrum, killing all the known problematic variants in laboratory studies.

Chandele and her collaborators from ICMR’s National Institute of Malaria Research and Emory Vaccine Centre, Atlanta tested the human monoclonal antibody against several SARS-CoV-2 variants including Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and the recently emerging and highly infectious Omicron sub-lineages such as BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12, BA.4 and BA.5 and found that it maintains its neutralization potency against all these variants of concern.

Omicron and its sub lineages can evade natural and vaccine-generated immunity and pose a threat to immune-compromised, vaccine-hesitant, and unvaccinated adults and children.

However, only two of the currently approved therapeutic antibodies have shown neutralization potential to Omicron — sotrovimab and bebtelovimab. The second one is prescribed in the US

Explaining the molecular structure of the new antibody (named 002-S21F2) in a study published in Science Advances, the scientists said it had tremendous potential to treat Covid-19 patients.

ICMR, ICGEB, Department of Biotechnology and Emory jointly hold the patent on the new antibody, derived from Covid-19 recovered Indian patients. Since it is derived from humans, there is no issue on tolerance.

Chandele said new and better quality vaccines could be designed using the new antibody and the scientific information that came up. Concurs virologist Shahid Jameel, a former ICGEB scientist who currently is a Research Fellow, Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.

“It’s too late for this to work as a Covid-19 therapeutic, but it can inform on making a broadly effective vaccine. It also shows that Indian researchers can put together a therapeutic antibody pipeline very quickly for other infections and the next big outbreak,” said Jameel, who is not associated with the research.