But one day in 2009, while Mascola was sitting in the laboratory room, about to eat a sandwich, one of the scientists approached him with a big smile on his face: they had found the lack of shine he had. they had been looking. .
This antibody came from a man known as Donor 45. Doria-Rose, who met with study participants when they came to their regular checkups, says Donor 45 was an extremely private black gay man in the sixty from the Washington, DC area,. They named the antibody VRC01 – the first from the Vaccine Research Center.
It took almost a decade to develop a drug out of this antibody and set up a clinical trial to make sure it was safe and effective. Other HIV researchers who have traveled different paths have come up with antiretroviral drugs – the famous “triple cocktail” – that effectively treat and prevent HIV infections by interfering with the virus’s ability to reproduce on its own. The crisis was not over. People still get HIV, but with antiretrovirals it could lead a largely normal life. As access to these drugs has expanded, the effort to use antibodies to make HIV drugs has become less urgent. He connected, a clinical trial was started, but not so many people paid much attention.
And then came Covid-19. On that day in January 2020, Mascola immediately saw that everything he and his colleagues had learned from studying HIV antibodies could be mobilized to treat the new pathogen. It would be “the culmination of a lifetime’s work,” he says.
Mascola is a restrained type. He communicates with the economy. “When you put an exclamation mark in an email, you know you’ve done something great!” Doria-Rose wrote to me. So when she came to her office, they got to work. Doria-Rose began asking team members to turn on the cell sorting machines and fill the small boxes with muffins and create glowing test cells. They revised their work schedules and entered everything.
Just before you were born, your immune system began to produce antibodies to fight potential pathogens. They are amazingly diverse: an average person has billions of B cells that can produce somewhere between 9 and 17 million different antibodies. Antibody molecules are Y-shaped, and their tips have corners that can block on specific viruses or bacteria. When this binding occurs, the antibodies block the invaders from attaching to healthy cells and transfer them. The really ingenious thing, however, is not just that an antibody can look for its enemy for destruction, but that blocking the pathogen is also a signal to the immune system to do more of that particular form. Even a single antibody can summon troops, allowing the immune system to wage war against an invading army.
Unfortunately, when a completely new pathogen appears, such as HIV or the new coronavirus, a well-suited form is rare, even in our pre-existing natural repertoire of antibodies. Vaccines, which usually consist of a weakened virus or fragments of a virus, train the body to develop a blocking antibody – one that will bind and neutralize the real pathogen when we encounter it in the world. This is known as active immunity. The body’s immune system goes to basic training and appears with a suitable fighting force. Instead, antibody therapies like the ones Mascola worked on for HIV give you passive immunity: a mercenary army is introduced into your body to do temporary work for you.
The discovery of passive immunity dates back to the late 19th century, when Emil Behring, a sad-eyed, hooded-bearded German scientist, began injecting 220 children with animal blood. However, the children had contracted diphtheria, a terrible disease that slowly suffocated its victims. Behring had tried to treat the disease by experimenting with rabbits, guinea pigs, goats, and horses, giving the infected animals the blood of the recovered. He didn’t know why, but the sick animals got better. So he gave the children the blood of animals exposed to diphtheria, and in 1894 he published the results: Almost twice as many children as would be expected to survive. Behring’s approach to “serum therapy” was considered so successful that he later received the first Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.