Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day thirty seven
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story,
Speaker 1: people who have recovered from COVID nineteen may be able
Speaker 1: to help others who have the illness in a bold
Speaker 1: new way. They can donate their blood plasma to have
Speaker 1: it injected directly into patients. But researchers first have to
Speaker 1: figure out exactly how to harness antibodies, those magical proteins
Speaker 1: in the blood of recovered patients. But first, here's what
Speaker 1: happened today. Just a few days after President Donald Trump
Speaker 1: insisted he had absolute authority to reopen the economy, he
Speaker 1: issued guidelines that put the onus on governors and businesses
Speaker 1: to make the tough calls. Trump released a brief document
Speaker 1: that suggested what state should consider as they decide whether
Speaker 1: to relax stay at home orders or other virus containment measures,
Speaker 1: but the difficult decisions were largely left to state houses.
Speaker 1: The president set no deadlines, demanded no particular action, and
Speaker 1: offered little federal assistance. Included in the guidelines is the
Speaker 1: instruction that state should plan to independently secure protective gear
Speaker 1: and medical equipment for their hospitals. The guidelines did not
Speaker 1: set out a plan for dramatically ramping up testing and
Speaker 1: contact tracing, something experts say should be a prerequisite for
Speaker 1: relaxing lockdowns. On the science front, there is promising development
Speaker 1: in the quest to return to normal life. A coronavirus
Speaker 1: vaccine could be in production by September. Researchers at the
Speaker 1: University of ox Heard are testing of vaccine they hope
Speaker 1: will show results by the fall, and manufacturing is already
Speaker 1: under way. And finally, a glimpse of the economic havoc
Speaker 1: the coronavirus has reaked on China. The country's economy shrank
Speaker 1: last quarter for the first time in decades, following almost
Speaker 1: seven percent from a year ago. With the disease spread
Speaker 1: around the world, China is counting on shaky local demand
Speaker 1: to prop up a recovery. Now to today's main story,
Speaker 1: there's a sliver of hope for people very ill with
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen. It's a bold new treatment that involves taking
Speaker 1: the blood plasma of people who have recovered from the
Speaker 1: disease and injecting it into people who are very sick.
Speaker 1: The secret is in the antibodies. A protein that is
Speaker 1: produced when someone's immune system has fought the virus, But
Speaker 1: using antibodies to treat the sick is more complicated than
Speaker 1: just transferring them from one person to another. Bloomberg Senior
Speaker 1: editor Jason Gale reports on what researchers are doing to
Speaker 1: sift through the many antibodies out there and find the
Speaker 1: right ones to help people recover from being infected. Dr
Speaker 1: Erica Ulman Sapphire says her job is like military intelligence.
Speaker 1: She's an immunologist and professor at the Lahoya Institute for Immunology,
Speaker 1: a nonprofit research center in San Diego, and her job
Speaker 1: is to find the weak spots in the most deadly
Speaker 1: viruses and exploit them using antibodies. So you know, when
Speaker 1: the military can figure out how to precisely drop a
Speaker 1: bomb and one particular bad guy is sitting in one
Speaker 1: particular chair, in one particular room, one particular compound without
Speaker 1: any collateral damage because somebody had a high resolution photographs.
Speaker 1: So that's what we do for viruses. We take those
Speaker 1: incredibly high resolution photographs and three dimensions and figure out
Speaker 1: how do you work, what's your weak spot, where are
Speaker 1: you vulnerable? What happens if you put an animalty here.
Speaker 1: Erica has spent years in this field. In fact, she
Speaker 1: figured out a key step in how e Bowler invades cells.
Speaker 1: The discovery opened up a way for drug therapies that
Speaker 1: have greatly improved survival for people with a POLO with
Speaker 1: the coronavirus. Currently, no drug is being proven to work
Speaker 1: against it, and a vaccine maybe at least a year away.
Speaker 1: That's why Erica says antibody infusions from survivors may work
Speaker 1: out to be the fastest life saving option when someone
Speaker 1: has recently survived the disease, especially of really new disease
Speaker 1: for which there aren't any other treatments, the blood of
Speaker 1: those survivors could be something that helps somebody else. The
Speaker 1: survivors have those immune molecules in their blood, and the
Speaker 1: absence of any other medicine you can give somebody, you
Speaker 1: could offer them a survivor's blood and that gives them
Speaker 1: that immunity immediately but temporarily, but that could help. Erica says.
Speaker 1: Antibodies viruses by recognizing and latching onto them, and their
Speaker 1: job is to seek that out anchor onto it never
Speaker 1: let go. And when they do that, they can mechanically
Speaker 1: and activate the pat so by grabbing onto it, they
Speaker 1: do what we call they neutralize it, meaning they could
Speaker 1: prevent the virus from attaching to yourself. The base does
Speaker 1: other things. The base says, I am attached to something
Speaker 1: that must be destroyed, and so it signals all of
Speaker 1: your other immunes, cells and immune centuries to come to
Speaker 1: the side of infection and destroy the virus or destroy
Speaker 1: the infected cell. So it's no longer a virus factory.
Speaker 1: And those different kinds of activities are complementary. Knowing more
Speaker 1: about coronavirus antibodies will inform ways to make an optimal
Speaker 1: vaccine against it, but study results using antibodies to thwart
Speaker 1: the disease are still unclear. One such that he published
Speaker 1: in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March
Speaker 1: reported the results of five critically ill COVID nineteen patients
Speaker 1: in China. These patients received blood components from five adults
Speaker 1: who had recovered from the disease. The study didn't have
Speaker 1: a control lam, so there's nowhere to tell if the
Speaker 1: treatment made a difference. All five patients seem to improve,
Speaker 1: though Eric is working on a more sophisticated approach that
Speaker 1: will avoid some potential pitfalls and using the blood from
Speaker 1: just any survivor. The experiment in China was small and
Speaker 1: has some problems, she says. The first one is the
Speaker 1: risk it's blood from another human coming into your events.
Speaker 1: The other thing is that it's limited in quantity. You
Speaker 1: only got so much below the gift. The third thing
Speaker 1: is that it's really quite variable. Some people make a
Speaker 1: very strong immune response, are there is a very weak
Speaker 1: immune response. Erica's work involves coming through the millions of
Speaker 1: antibodies that people have made to find the very very
Speaker 1: best to three. The objective is to figure out what
Speaker 1: anybody treatments could best protect frontline healthcare workers and other
Speaker 1: people at risk of infection, as well as treat COVID
Speaker 1: maintained patients. My job is to be the clearing house
Speaker 1: of the world's antibodies, to gather them, to give them
Speaker 1: all code names, to make the study very fair, and
Speaker 1: organize an effort by which we compare them side by
Speaker 1: side to figure out what works, what's best, and why.
Speaker 1: And my group will also be solving the molecular structures
Speaker 1: to figure out what do they look like and how
Speaker 1: do we put the other complementary therapy. Erica says, antibody
Speaker 1: therapies might be applied differently depending on the patient. So
Speaker 1: the different kinds of people that might want an antibody
Speaker 1: therapy could be a perfectly healthy health care worker that
Speaker 1: wants to stay that way, so a preventative, or it
Speaker 1: could be a person who has been newly infected but
Speaker 1: they're vulnerable and so they really need a treatment. Or
Speaker 1: it could be somebody that's in full on serious disease. Okay,
Speaker 1: full on serious disease. You may want to control immune activity,
Speaker 1: but to prevent somebody from getting infected, it might want
Speaker 1: more of that activity, and so different antibody frameworks in
Speaker 1: different ways to engineer the antibody where you could dial
Speaker 1: that up and turn it off. The ultimate goal would
Speaker 1: be a treatment mixture, called that a cocktail, but probably
Speaker 1: two different antibodies that would command the virus in different
Speaker 1: ways and might do different things, and the goal is
Speaker 1: to inactivate the virus two ways at once. Dozens of
Speaker 1: research groups are racing the pandemic to collect and incubate
Speaker 1: thousands of antibodies. Erica says they'll send their best to
Speaker 1: her lab to evaluate in clinical trials, and the results
Speaker 1: should be no much sooner than parallel research into experimental
Speaker 1: vaccines dose take longer to develop because scientists need to
Speaker 1: first find a molecule that will safely and effectively trigger
Speaker 1: the kind of infection. Finding antibodies, Erica's lab is already screening,
Speaker 1: and the reason is faster is because an antibody is
Speaker 1: a natural human molecule. We understand how it works. We've
Speaker 1: made them before. When you've made them before, it's easy
Speaker 1: to scale them up again. We understand how to evaluate them,
Speaker 1: we understand their pharmaco kinetics, we understand how they behave.
Speaker 1: It's faster, easier, and more straightforward to mobilize an antibody
Speaker 1: right away than something entirely new. To make this happen
Speaker 1: means a lot of lab work. Yeah, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of coffee. Eric's lab was recently given almost two million
Speaker 1: dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to evaluate
Speaker 1: Canada antibodies in the fight against COVID nineteen. Patient studies
Speaker 1: will probably start within a few months after Eric's lab
Speaker 1: is identified the best ones to test. And that's our
Speaker 1: show for today. For more on the outbreak from one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com,
Speaker 1: slash Coronavirus and one small favor. If you appreciate show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
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Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is
Speaker 1: hosted by Me Laura Carlson. The show was produced by
Speaker 1: Me tophor Foreheaz, Jordan Gospoure, and Magnus Hendrickson. Today's main
Speaker 1: story was reported by Jason Gale. Original music by Leo Sidrin.
Speaker 1: Our editors are Francesca Lead and Rick Shine. Francesca Levi
Speaker 1: is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.