Spray against COVID-19

Nasal spray with antibodies can protect against coronavirus and even cure covid

Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow

A spray gun with hybrid antibodies significantly reduced the number of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles in the lungs of infected mice, according to a press release from Preclinical research reveals that new IgM antibodies administered internally to fight COVID-19 more potent than commonly used ones.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, scientists have been thinking about creating antibodies to treat COVID-19. Today, some of these antibodies are undergoing the last stages of clinical trials, and some are approved for use in emergency situations. Among doctors, however, antibody treatment is not very popular, Zhiqiang An, a bioengineer at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, said in a comment to Nature News.

This is partly due to the fact that the antibodies available for use are injected intravenously, and not directly into the respiratory tract, where the virus is mainly located, and with such delivery, high doses of antibody drugs are required to achieve the effect.

An and his colleagues set out to design antibodies that could be delivered directly into the nasal cavity. They scanned a library of antibodies from healthy people and focused on those antibodies that were able to recognize the components of SARS-CoV-2 used by the virus to attach to cells and penetrate them.

Among the promising candidates were IgG antibodies, which appear relatively late after infection, but are quite precisely tailored to the invading pathogen. Fragments of such antibodies were cross-linked by scientists with another type of molecule, IgM antibodies, which act as rapid response agents to a wide range of infections.

The constructed IgM antibodies had a stronger neutralizing effect against more than 20 variants of SARS-CoV-2 than IgG alone. After being injected into the noses of mice either six hours before infection or six hours after, the engineered IgMs rapidly reduced the amount of virus in the rodents' lungs two days after infection, the researchers report in the journal Nature (Ku et al. Nasal delivery of an IgM offers broad protection from SARS-CoV-2 variants – VM). This work is "a great achievement in bioengineering," says Guy Gorochov, an immunologist at the Sorbonne University of Paris, but it is not yet known how long these antibodies will last in the human body. Zhiqian An imagines the constructed antibodies as a kind of chemical mask for those who encounter SARS-CoV-2, as well as additional protection for people who are not fully vaccinated. Since IgM molecules are relatively stable, they are suitable for creating a nasal spray from them, which you can buy at a pharmacy and keep with you just in case, An adds. 

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