‘AeroNabs’ Promise Powerful, Inhalable Protection Against Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

‘AeroNabs’ Promise Powerful, Inhalable Protection Against Covid-19

ucsf.edu

21 pointsjacquesm11 comments

Competing Interest Statement

"M. Schoof, B. Faust, R. Saunders, N. Hoppe, P. Walter, and A. Manglik are inventors on a provisional patent describing anti-Spike nanobodies described in this manuscript."

PR for this has reached every outlet from USA Today to sci.electronics.design on Usenet. However, there seems to be zero commentary on it from serious medical sites or journals.

Derek Lowe has now covered it: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/13/na...

Single-domain antibodies have been around for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-domain_antibody

"Promise" is maybe too strong a word for something that has only been shown to neutralize the virus in liquid form in in vitro cell culture so far.

School press releases are always like this for alumni projects.

Long way to verifying the safety, given the particle size, but that's a fairly novel mechanism of action from my limited knowledge.

Wonder if it's similar to eg https://www.molecularpartners.com/molecular-partners-announc...

A friend (PhD researcher) introduced me to nanobodies and the science around them a few years back, it's pretty fascinating and cool to see more and more practical applications.

> As the world awaits vaccines to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, UC San Francisco scientists have devised a novel approach to halting the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease.

Not clear at all how this thing can be ready for use before vaccines become available. This is a long way before Phase 1 clinical trials, while quite a few vaccines are well into their Phase 3 trials.

Vaccine efficacy is not yet proven. Even if highly effective, vaccines will take years to circulate the world. Something like this, much easier to produce, supposedly, can fill that vaccine gap.

This is super cool, but unfortunately a little too late to the game. We will likely have a vaccine by Feb next year. To scale-up a protein antibody, run trials, and get approval for such a novel idea--plus you would need the device to be either CE or approved already because that would take a whole lot longer if not--will take best case 1 year. Doesn't mean they shouldn't find an industry partner to go for it, but I doubt anyone would pick it up without government backstopping and right now the focus is on vaccine and mAb scale-up.

This sounds like a great way to solve the “vaccines don’t give recurring income” problem.

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