Live data from Hacker News

New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

hms.harvard.edu

101–110 of 211 posts

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#101
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments should not just fund drug and vaccine research. They should employ most of the researchers and own most of the labs. Problem solved. Give a hundred billion to vaccine research and then release it to the public with a mandated price - job complete.

What about development?

Basically I’m saying they should make a finished solution but leave distribution and full scale manufacturing to private industry. Not because private will do that part better, but because at that point there’s not much need to use taxes to finish the job. What drug manufacturer wouldn’t want the contract to exclusively sell an already developed product? All they need to do is follow FDA regulations and pricing.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#103
post #98
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually asked ‘how sure are we’ - you’re right though, just saying - learn more about it - isn’t exactly helpful. If it is as ‘basic’ as you say maybe you could explain it rather than just appeal to authority.

I’m sorry but I can’t state this any more plainly without this turning into a lecture. It is basic evolutionary biology, in as much as gravity keeps your feet attached to the ground. It is not an appeal to authority, it is simply a statement of fact and an underlying premise of a complex field. You seem like the sort of person who likes doing your own research - I’ve given you the key to the door now you just have to…

Is this a statistical reality? As in it would take a 1/1,000,000 chance to evolve out of this local maxima?

Or is it a logical reality? i.e. we know the possible permutations of the RNA and from its current state it could not reach an escape branch?

Edit: FYI, my biology is weak but it has occured to me that there must be a topology of evolution.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#104
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they could make more than $XB by selling it afterwards? Also, who's to say that Pfizer can't make an additional deal, or funding, for this effort?

How? What’s the incentive for Pfizer to fund development if they don’t get exclusivity?

They acquire the rights i don't think they fund much.

Why these diseases are serious enough to lock us all in our fucking homes but yet rampant profiteering is allowed is a travesty. The entire state and industry hand in hand, defacto fascism.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#105
post #57

Can we please have this sort of research for the common cold and flu please. I hate flu season, I'm normally sick three of four times a winter. I get really sick at least once a year. I'd love to avoid that.

My wife used to be the same, got 3-5 colds/winter. Started wearing N95 masks with Covid and hasn't had a cold since. Basic hygiene really helps. Though you might have unavoidable exposure (workplace, commute, etc) which increases your risk.

Exactly this. People notice this when they have kids and kids start going to kindergarten.

I was almost never sick with colds until my kid started going out with other kids. I thought I had a great immunity, it happens I only had good hygiene - washing hands, avoiding contact, rarely going to mass event during flu season and etc.

As kids have poorer hygiene habits, are in very very close contact with each other they get sick easier. After a week or so the father is sick with exactly the same symptoms.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#106
post #87
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by giving human populations such artificial resistances (non-live vaccines) we run the risk of selecting for viruses that are even harder for even our own immune systems to detect and destroy I can put your fears to bed. That shouldn't happen. How vaccines work is they teach a very specific signature to our bodies so it can be destroyed as soon as it appears. . Therefore, any selection pressure would just be to not…

Are you saying that because the number of possible signatures is so vast and the vaccines so specific, even if they get slightly broader it isn’t going to make things worse because in the grand scale of things we aren’t really walling too much off?

I think what they are saging is that something that kills perfectly, every time does not generate selective pressure. The virus would have to lose the signature completely randomly.

Whereas antibiotic resistance is something that could develop because antibiotics could be under doses so individuals survived partial exposure or perhaps they worked by a mechanisms which already had some resistance in the population.

It's like, you can breed high lung capacity mammals by having them live in water but you would just kill the species if you jumped straight into holding them underwater for 20 minutes.

Something has to be survivable to genetate selective pressure.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#107
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Can’t help but wonder how conserved the relevant site actually is. I wonder because targeting such a site seems to me like the premise of this kind of research: find “mission critical” highly conserved genes and then clinically target them. And yet, scanning the paper’s abstract and introduction (the paper is linked in the posted article) I couldn’t find any mention of any highly conserved genome site. As a l…

>’SP1-77 binds the spike protein at a site that so far has not been mutated in any variant’ Is the section you are looking for that says ‘this section is highly conserved throughout all known variants’. The novel method appears to be the the humanisation of mouse cells - ‘ The researchers first inserted two human gene segments into the mice. This pushed the mice’s immune cells to quickly produce a diverse repertoire…

I believe your quote is from the article posted here. I was talking about the paper, which I only read lightly.

Checking now the Results section of the paper, they do address how conservative the relevant genome site is, extracted below (emphases mine). TLDR: very but just short of completely conserved. Seems hopeful.

---

> Comparison of SP1-77 footprint to the mutations on the RBD of variants.

When the SP1-77 footprint was projected onto modeled RBDs from different SARS-CoV-2 variants (Fig. 5, A and B), it was evident that most mutations were located outside of the SP1-77 binding site, except for the Arg346Lys in the Mu and Omicron-BA.1.1 variants, and the Gly339Asp and Asn440Lys in all current Omicron sub-variants (50).

The modeled interfaces of SP1-77 bound to the Mu and Omicron RBDs, based on the SP1-77/G614 S complex, indicated that the conservative Arg346Lys mutation would preserve the interaction with HC CDR3 and would not have much impact on binding. Likewise, the Gly339Asp and Asn440Lys mutations were at the edge of the SP1-77 epitope with their side chains pointing away from the binding interface, explaining why Omicron variants were sensitive to SP1-77 neutralization (Fig. 5C).

While mutations near the Asn343-glycan in Omicron reconfigure the orientation such that the carbohydrate projects away from the protein surface (51), such mutations had minimal impact on binding and neutralization activity of SP1-77 (Fig. 5C).

Thus, these studies provided a structure-driven hypothesis for why SP1-77 potently and broadly neutralized all tested SARS-CoV-2 variants through Omicron BA.5.

Finally, we compared the SP1-77 footprint with the new mutations on the recently emerged BA.2.75 sub-variant. The N460K mutation in BA.2.75 was far from the SP1-77 footprint (Fig. 5, A and B); while the BA.2.75 G339H and G446S mutations were close to but did not overlap with SP1-77 footprint as described for BA.1.

These findings made us hopeful that SP1-77 also will bind and robustly neutralize BA.2.75.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#108
post #57

Can we please have this sort of research for the common cold and flu please. I hate flu season, I'm normally sick three of four times a winter. I get really sick at least once a year. I'd love to avoid that.

Unless you're licking buttons on the subway, how could you possibly be getting exposed to that many different strains? For what it's worth adults get the flu about every 5 years[0]. It's not till we get elderly that we can start catching the same or similar strains more frequently. Similarly with the cold, which are coronaviruses like COVID just lead to less lasting immunity. Long story short. This kind of research w…

> Unless you're licking buttons on the subway, how could you possibly be getting exposed to that many different strains?

Kids in primary school (aka the local pathogen exchange) will do that.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#109
post #83
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are we sure and how are we sure This is basic evolutionary theory that has been subsequently played out in both the lab and in the wild. You can't prove a negative but your requirement for reassurance will only be assuaged by furthering your own understanding of evolution on a molecular level, it doesn't seem like anything I could say to you in a reply to an internet post would make the slightest bit of differenc…

I actually asked ‘how sure are we’ - you’re right though, just saying - learn more about it - isn’t exactly helpful. If it is as ‘basic’ as you say maybe you could explain it rather than just appeal to authority.

I think OP is trying to say this is a complex field which requires a long-form medium (books, at minimum) to explain the current evolutionary theory work to a layman. But among researchers in that field this falls within the "basics", and so barring a fundamental upheaval of a lot of well-observed theories (outlined briefly in those books) we're in the clear.

I think this is fair, even if a bit frustrating that the explanation can't be broken down simpler to laymen.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#110
post #57

Can we please have this sort of research for the common cold and flu please. I hate flu season, I'm normally sick three of four times a winter. I get really sick at least once a year. I'd love to avoid that.

My wife used to be the same, got 3-5 colds/winter. Started wearing N95 masks with Covid and hasn't had a cold since. Basic hygiene really helps. Though you might have unavoidable exposure (workplace, commute, etc) which increases your risk.

Yeah it does. I made some changes when I got married. I think my problem is that I had my sinuses removed along with a tumor when I was a teenager. Now it seems I just need to see someone sick and I'll catch what they have.

During the pandemic I started taking vitamin d. That really took the edge off of the flu. I suspect I'm a bit low on that.

Post reply on HN