But one day in 2009, while Mascola was sitting in the laboratory’s rest room about to eat a sandwich, one of his scientists approached with a big smile on her face: They found the a cry they were looking for.
That antibody came from a man called Donation 45. Doria-Rose, who met with study partners when they came in for their regular checkups, says Donor 45 was a very private gay black man in the sixties from the Washington, DC area. . They named it antibody VRC01 – the first from the Vaccine Research Center.
It took nearly a decade to create a drug from this antibody and set up a clinical trial to make sure it was safe and effective. Other HIV researchers came down various routes with anti-retroviral drugs – the famous “triple cocktail” – which effectively treats and prevents HIV infections by interfere with the virus’ ability to make its own copies. The crisis was not over. People still contracted HIV, but with the antiretrovirals they were able to lead a normal life. As access to these drugs expanded, the effort to use antibodies to make HIV drugs less urgent. He went in, a clinical trial was started, but so many people weren’t paying much attention.
And then came Covid-19. That day in January 2020, Mascola immediately saw that everything he and his colleagues learned from studying HIV antibodies could be transferred to treat the new pathogen. It would be “the product of a lifetime’s work,” he says.
Mascola is a form of restraint. It communicates with the economy. “When he sends one exclamation point in an email, you know you have done something amazing!” Doria-Rose wrote to me. So when it came to her office, they got down to business. Doria-Rose began asking team members to burn out the cell correction devices and fill the tiny muffin tins and engineered test cells. They updated their schedules and went inside.
Even before you born, your immune system started making antibodies to fight against potential pathogens. They are very diverse: The average person has billions of B cells that can produce between 9 and 17 million specific antibodies. They have a Y-shaped antibody molecule, and their tips contain lumps and clumps that can lock in certain viruses or bacteria. When that binding occurs, the antibodies prevent the invaders from attaching to healthy cells and shutting them away. The very clever thing, however, is that not only can an antibody seek its enemy to destroy it, but the act of locking the pathogen is also a signal to the immune system to make more of that particular shape. Even one antibody can summon the soldiers, allowing your defense system to wage war against an attacking army.
Unfortunately, when an entirely new pathogen such as HIV or the new coronavirus emerges, a matching form is rare, even in our vast array of natural preexisting antibodies. Vaccines, which usually contain a weakened virus or fragments of a virus, train the body to develop a locking antibody – one that binds to and neutralizes the true pathogen when we encounter it. -world. This is called active immunity. The body’s immune system goes into basic training, and it manifests with an appropriate fighting force. In contrast, antibody treatments like the ones Mascola worked on for HIV give you tolerable immunity: A mercenary arm is inserted into the body to do the job for you for a while.
The discovery of tolerant immunity dates back to the late 19th century, when Emil Behring, a sad-eyed German scientist with a hood and a trim beard, began injecting 220 children with animal blood. The children had contracted diphtheria, a debilitating illness suffered by sufferers slowly. Behring had been trying to treat the disease, experimenting with rabbits, guinea pigs, goats and horses, donating blood to those infected. He did not know why, but the sick animals progressed. So he donated the blood of animals susceptible to diphtheria to the children, and in 1894 he published the results: There were about twice as many children as would normally be expected. Behring’s “serum therapy” approach was considered such a success that he won the first ever Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.