Hyderabad: Medical specialists and researchers, across the world, are working non-stop in various laboratories to come up with solutions that can contain the coronavirus spread. Different treatment modalities have been adopted to protect victims from the current pestilence.
Insufficient availability of proper medicines and vaccine are forcing the clinicians to opt for a research based on the plasma of the virus. This technique is being used in the treatment as it is helping the doctors treat the patients at least to an extent, though not as much as hoped for.
To provide plasma treatment, blood must be collected from the survivors of the coronavirus.
However, it is not known as to how many such survivors are willing to donate blood. To overcome this problem, a few days ago, Dr K Lalitya who is doing her MD in General Medicine at the Flinders University, Australia has come up with a concept paper on the creation of artificial/synthetic antibodies to fight the virus spread and has submitted her concept paper to the International Journal of Medicine.
She is currently based out of Chennai and is the granddaughter of the great immortal singer Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao. She spoke exclusively with 'Eenaadu’ about the synthetic antibody.
DNA in the Phage Display mode
During the period from 20th January 2020 till 25th March 2020, doctors at the Shen Zhen Hospital in China have induced antibodies into five COVID-19 patients, through the plasma therapy. Then three of them were sent home after being treated and found to be recovering. Plasma treatment requires the blood of the patients who have recovered from the infection.
However, some of such people may not come forward to give blood, voluntarily. To counter this situation, white blood cells in the blood are required to be converted into identical antibody DNA cells.
Antibodies and DNA should be prepared using the Phage Display method for synthetic antibody preparation. Such created antibodies should be cleansed by the buffer Fueled elyusan while pouring the ‘Viro-D6’ over the cells, in the laboratories.
In this sequence, the tissue material required for the preparation of the antibody will stick just to a single cell and this process will take at least a month for completion. These experiments can be carried out in laboratories run by governments, research centres or in the private labs with due permissions taken from the governments.
Results in 50 days
Once a single antibody is created, the same can be replicated in millions of copies. However, they should first be tested on animals like rabbits and monkeys. The incubation period of the Coronavirus is 14 days. Considering the effects on them during this period, the required changes and additions to the synthetic antibody preparation are possible.
The antibody preparation takes about 30 days and another 14 days for incubation and performance testing, totalling to about 44 days to 50 days, for the exact results to surface.
The preparation of this antibody, injected into the patient's blood, is called ‘passive immunity’ in medical terms. This procedure was introduced by scientists back in the year 1894 itself, to boost immunity in people with serious illnesses and viral problems.
After that, passive immunity was given to those suffering from severe illnesses such as tuberculosis, necrosis and typhoid with positive results. This is also being used in some countries to cure cancer. An antibody such designed for coronavirus may also be used for future vaccination to cure the coronavirus. Currently, numerous experiments are being carried out to fight with COVID-19. When compared, the process of creating such synthetic antibodies may be claimed to be an easy way out in the fight against the world-wide pandemic COVID-19!!
