Protective Antibody Therapy: Preventing Future COVID-19 Outbreaks

By Dean Giovanniello, RPh., Vice President; Rebecca Podolsky, Senior Analyst; Holger Müller, Vice President; Balazs Felcsuti, Vice President; and Carrie Jones, Vice President

Key Takeaways

COVID-19 vaccines may not be available for at least 12 to 18 months, and possibly as long as five years. More near-term solutions are needed to provide a therapeutic treatment and to achieve prophylactic immunity in high-risk groups.
Historical evidence from similar viruses such as SARS1 and the H1N1 influenza established precedents for the use of antibodies from convalescent patients to treat or confer immunity.
As accuracy of and access to antibody-detecting diagnostics grow, allowing for widespread testing, countries have initiated nationwide serosurveys which may hold the key to develop plasma-derived antibody therapies.
A significant number of companies and consortia have embarked on this concept and first-movers are entering clinical testing as early as in the second half of 2020.
However, the availability of sufficient amounts of convalescent plasma remains a key challenge. A novel approach, called recombinant anti-coronavirus 19 hyperimmune gammaglobulin or rCIG, may provide a longer-term alternative to plasma-derived therapies and can generate scalable polyclonal antibody therapies for millions of patients.