A world premiere from Erasmus MC and Utrecht University: they found an antibody against COVID-19

Since Thursday evening, the article by a team of ten scientists has been online on BioRxiv - a website where biologists can publish their research before it will be assessed by the prestigious journal Nature. In the summary, the scientists describe an antibody to SARS2, the coronavirus causing the current pandemic (COVID-19). The antibody can help detect and prevent this type of corona infection.

Disclaimer: The antibody still has to be tested on humans (and this will take months) and the article is under peer review before Nature will publish it. But the professor of cell biology Frank Grosveld is hopeful: “We expect an email any moment”.

“We have published an article about an antibody that we had already isolated before the current pandemic and which cross-reacted (biological term for repelling a foreign substance, ed.) with various coronaviruses. The antibody prevents the virus from being able to infect and can also help in the detection of the virus,” mentioned professor Grosveld.

Read full interview here

Chunyan Wang, Wentao Li, Dubravka Drabek, Nisreen MA Okba, Rien van Haperen, Albert DME Osterhaus, Frank JM van Kuppeveld, Bart L Haagmans, Frank Grosveld, Berend-Jan Bosch.
A human monoclonal 1 antibody blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection.
bioRxiv, 2020. doi: 10.1101/2020.03.11.987958