Novel Antibody Countermeasures Platform Created by Scientists for Future Emerging Viruses

Scientists at Sandia have just created a new platform for discovering, engineering, and designing novel antibody countermeasures for future emerging viruses. The new process of screening nanobodies that either neutralize or disable viruses represents a faster, more efficient, and effective approach to nano by therapy development for preventing and treating viral infections.

Understanding Antibodies and its Role in Your Immune System

Emerging Viruses — Pexels/Oles kanebckuu

On a daily basis, a person inhales an average of a million viruses, according to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Antibodies help your immune system counteract the threat. Viruses are deadly and can kill twice more people than cancer, where roughly 15 million people die due to viruses across the globe annually.

A key weapon against viruses is antibodies. These are molecules made of white blood cells that fight off foreign invaders. A person, on average, has over 10 billion different antibodies. Hence, these small protein-based molecules are your immune system's natural defense against virus and bacterial threats.

When vaccines inject dead, weakened, or a slightly different version of a virus, it triggers your immune system to make more of the specific antibodies with the right shape for neutralizing or defeating the virus. Once the body has made enough antibodies, the immune system will remember which type of antibody to create for specific threats. Hence, if a person gets infected with the real virus, the immune system already has a head start with the right kind of antibodies to destroy the virus.

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Novel Antibody Countermeasures Platform

Traditionally antibodies are used to treat a wide variety of conditions like autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and cancer. Nanobodies are smaller components of antibodies and are the primary foundation for the newly created platform.

After analyzing a large, diverse library of synthetic nanobodies, researchers were able to identify and evaluate several potent nanobodies that could protect against COVID-19. Scientists from Sandia's Chemical, Biological, Radiological, And Nuclear Defense and Energy Technologies Center then set out to replicate the method to defend against ongoing and future biological threats.

Craig Tewell, director of Sandia, says in a statement that the COVID pandemic has made it evident that there is a need for a broad range of prevention and therapeutic strategies to control diseases linked with novel viruses. With a history of biodefense research, scientists from Sandia help protect the world from threats presented by naturally occurring diseases and bioterrorism, adds Tewell.

Brook Harmon, a virologist and lead nanobody researcher at Sandia-an, an emerging area of bioscience, explains that vaccines are a good way of preventing infections. However, they take a long time to be developed and move through regulations. Stating that the team saw a critical need to create effective therapies that can be developed and deployed faster and more efficiently, reports PhysOrg.

Once the genetic coding and protein sequence of the virus has been identified, researchers have shown at Sandia that they can produce nanobody-based countermeasures in only 90 short days. Although the method has not yet been tested, the novel platform could reduce the impact of future virus outbreaks.