RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – An Argentine laboratory will start human trials of a serum made from plasma of horses infected with the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus for the treatment of Covid-19. On Friday, July 24th, the Argentine health regulatory agency approved the research’s human clinical trials stage.
The National Administration of Medicines, Food and Medical Technology (ANMAT) approved the clinical protocol of the hyperimmune serum against Covid-19. The drug is considered a potential treatment for coronavirus infection.
There is no approved treatment or vaccine for Covid-19 to date. Human trials will assess the safety and efficacy of this substance in the body. The hyperimmune serum was developed by researchers at the National University of San Martín in partnership with the biotechnology company Inmunova.
Hospital trials
The clinical study will start in four Buenos Aires hospitals and the trials may be extended to ten other health centers in the metropolitan area, where 90 percent of the country’s coronavirus cases are found.
Researcher Fernando Goldbaum explained that the treatment consists of administering these antibodies, produced by horses, to Covid-19 patients. According to him, the solution is capable of braking and neutralizing the virus, preventing the development of the disease.
In “in vitro” laboratory trials, the serum proved capable of neutralizing the virus up to 50 times more than in trials using plasma extracted from recovered human patients.
‘Antibody factory’
The serum is an immunotherapy based on equine polyclonal antibodies. They are obtained after injecting a Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus protein into horses: the disease does not develop in these animals, but causes the production of large amounts of neutralizing antibodies.
“The horse is a biofactory. With just a few horses it is possible to extract a high quantity of serum,” said researcher Fernando Goldbaum.
After the plasma is extracted, the antibodies are purified and processed to obtain a high-purity and safety proportion of them.
Research in Brazil
A technology similar to Argentina’s is also under study in Brazil. A research by the Vital Brazil Institute, in Rio de Janeiro, is developing, with the help of horses, a serum that promises good results in the treatment of Covid-19.
The anti-Covid serum is intended to be a form of treatment for sick patients, not a vaccine. It is estimated that the product will be available in the first months of 2021.
The goal is to use the horse’s plasma – the liquid portion of the blood – to encourage the production of antibodies capable of fighting the novel coronavirus in humans. This would be achieved in two ways:
- One of them takes the protein the coronavirus uses to bind to the human cell and injects it into the horse. The goal is for the animal to produce antibodies capable of preventing the virus from infecting that cell.
- The other uses the whole virus, but inactivated. Thus, the horse produces antibodies that allow the human organism to destroy that virus.
Source: G1