Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2020 at 9:42 a.m.
Hundreds of laboratories around the world are competing to produce a vaccine against the new coronavirus, but researchers in China say they have already developed a treatment that can stop the epidemic.
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A drug in the testing phase at the prestigious Peking University (“Beida”) would not only speed up healing, but also temporarily immunize Covid-19.
In an interview with AFP, Sunney Xie, director of the Beida Center for Advanced Genomic Innovation, explains that the treatment works in mice. His laboratory collected antibodies from 60 patients cured of the disease before injecting them into rodents.
“After five days, their viral load had been divided by 2,500,” he says. “It means that this potential drug has a therapeutic effect.”
A study on this research was published Sunday in the specialized journal “Cell”. The study sees it as a potential “cure” for the disease and notes that it helps speed healing.
“We are experts in single cell sequencing, not immunologists or virologists,” said Professor Xie. “When we found that our approach found an antibody that neutralized (the virus), we were overjoyed.”
Available before the end of the year
According to him, the treatment could be available before the end of the year, in time in the event of a new winter offensive of the Covid-19 which, which arose in China at the end of last year, has already contaminated 4.5 million people around the world, including more than 316,000 fatally. “Preparation for clinical trials is underway,” added the researcher, adding that they will take place in Australia and other countries. With the recession of the epidemic in China, the Asian giant does not have enough carriers of the virus to carry out tests on humans.
“What we hope is that these antibodies will become a special drug that will stop the pandemic,” he said.
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