But one day in 2009, while Mascola was in the lab break room eating a sandwich, one of his scientists came up to him with a big smile: they had found the no-glow they were looking for. goods. .
That antibody came from a man known as Donor 45. Doria-Rose, who met the study participants when they came in for their regular check-ups, says Donor 45 was an extremely private gay black man in his sixties. from Washington, DC. . They named the antibody VRC01 – the first from the Vaccine Research Center.
It took almost a decade to develop a drug from this antibody and set up a clinical trial to make sure it was safe and effective. Other HIV researchers taking different paths have come up with antiretroviral drugs – the famous “triple cocktail” – that effectively treat and prevent HIV infections by interfering with the virus’s ability to make copies of itself. The crisis was not over yet. People still contracted HIV, but the antiretrovirals usually allowed them to lead normal lives. As access to those drugs increased, the effort to use antibodies to make HIV drugs became less urgent. It stopped, a clinical trial was started, but not that many people are paying close attention to it.
And then came Covid-19. That day in January 2020, Mascola immediately saw that everything he and his colleagues had learned from studying HIV antibodies could be mobilized to treat the new pathogen. It would be “the culmination of a life’s work,” he says.
Mascola is a modest man. He communicates with economics. “When he puts an exclamation point in an email, you know you’ve done something phenomenal!” Doria-Rose wrote to me. So when he came to her office, they got to work right away. Doria-Rose began asking the team members to start the cell sorters and fill the tiny muffin tins and develop test cells that glowed. They revised their work schedules and went all-in.
Even for you was born, your immune system began to make antibodies to fight off potential pathogens. They are astonishingly diverse: The average person has billions of B cells that can produce between 9 and 17 million different antibodies. Antibody molecules are Y-shaped and their tips have nooks and crannies that can attach to specific viruses or bacteria. When that binding occurs, the antibodies block the invaders from attaching to healthy cells and transporting them away. The really ingenious thing, though, is not only that an antibody can seek out its enemy to destroy, but that sticking to the pathogen is also a signal to the immune system to make more of that particular form. Even one antibody can summon the troops, allowing your immune system to wage war on an invading army.
Unfortunately, when an entirely new pathogen such as HIV or the new coronavirus emerges, a well-matched form is rare, even in our vast pre-existing natural repertoire of antibodies. Typically consisting of an attenuated virus or fragments of a virus, vaccines train the body to develop a locking antibody – an antibody that will bind to and neutralize the real pathogen when we encounter it in the world. This is known as active immunity. The body’s immune system goes to a basic workout and it emerges with a fit fighting force. Antibody therapies like the one Mascola was working on for HIV, on the other hand, give you passive immunity: a mercenary army is introduced into the body to do the work for you temporarily.
The discovery of passive immunity dates back to the late 1800s, when Emil Behring, a German scientist with sad hooded eyes and a slender beard, began injecting 220 children with animal blood. The children had all contracted diphtheria, a gruesome disease that slowly suffocated the victims. Behring had tried to treat the disease by experimenting with rabbits, guinea pigs, goats, and horses, and giving infected animals the blood of recovered animals. He didn’t know why, but the sick animals improved. So he gave the children the blood of diphtheria-exposed animals, and in 1894 published the results: About twice as many children as would normally be expected to survive actually survived. Behring’s “serum therapy” approach was considered such a success that he later received the first-ever Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.