The entire world is geared towards finding some sort of treatment, cure or vaccine for COVID-19. But what’s more interesting is that an American Doctor, Jacob Glanville, claims that his company is only 3-4 weeks away from creating an antibody that will fight the Coronavirus.
“What my company is doing is adapting antibodies to recognise and neutralise the novel coronavirus. So this would … [be] sort of skipping what a vaccine does,” Dr Jacob Glanville, the Distributed Bio co-founder and CEO, told Fox News in an interview on Thursday. A vaccine waits for you to produce an immune response while the antibodies fight the virus head on. If things go as plan “within about 20 minutes, that patient has the ability to neutralise the virus,” Glanville said.
According to the doctor, once the antibodies have been engineered, they will be sent to both the US Military as well as Charles River Laboratories, who will both conduct human studies over the Summer. “Both of those pieces of information come together so that we can produce batches, go through some red tape, and then do the first human studies that we’ll do on 200 to 600 people in the summer, probably in July.”
If you’re thinking that you no longer need to stay indoors or maintain social distancing, YOU ARE WRONG. Glanville said that he believes “social distancing” is working to reduce the spread of the virus, but that medicine is needed to further combat the spread. “It is definitely helping. We are way safer now than we were a week ago. The social distancing measures slow down the growth of new cases. But the problem is, eventually people have to go back to work. And the coronavirus appears so infectious that we don’t think we’re actually going to be able to just squish out the pandemic just through social distancing,” Glanville said.
Please remember, that the scientists need time to create a cure or treatment to fight the virus. Till then, everyone needs to maintain social distancing to ensure that the numbers don’t soar further. Pakistan’s tally of Coronavirus cases has already crossed 500. Please be a responsible citizen – if not for yourself then at least for the older people in your family or those that also have a weakened immune system. It’s time to be responsible.