But one day in 2009, while Mascola was sitting in the rest room of the laboratory about to eat a sandwich, one of his scientists turned to him with a big smile on his face: they had found the non-glow they had been looking for .
That antibody came from a man known as Donor 45. Doria-Rose, who met with study participants when they presented for periodic reviews, says Donor 45 was an extremely private gay man in his sixties. from the Washington, DC area. . They christened the antibody VRC01, the first of 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 who have traveled different paths have proposed antiretroviral drugs, the famous “triple cocktail,” that effectively treat and prevent HIV infections by interfering with the virus’s ability to make copies. The crisis was not over. People still had HIV, but with antiretrovirals they could live a mostly normal life. As access to these drugs expanded, the effort to use antibodies to make HIV drugs was less urgent. He connected, a clinical trial was started, but not so many people paid much 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 the study of HIV antibodies could be mobilized to treat the new pathogen. It would be “the culmination of a work of life,” he says.
Mascola is a retained type. It communicates with the economy. “When you put an exclamation mark in an email, you know you’ve done something phenomenal.” Doria-Rose wrote to me. So when he got to his office, they started working directly. Doria-Rose began asking team members to fire the cell sorting machines and fill the small cans of cupcakes and the glowing test cells. They checked their work schedules and got everything into it.
Even before you were born, your immune system began making antibodies to fight possible pathogens. They are incredibly 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 this binding occurs, the antibodies block the invasion of the invaders into healthy cells and transfer them. What is truly ingenious, however, is not only that an antibody can seek out its enemy for destruction, but that blocking the pathogen is also a signal to the immune system to do more in this particular way. Even an antibody can summon troops, allowing your immune system to wage war against an invading army.
Unfortunately, when a completely new pathogen such as HIV or the new coronavirus emerges, a form that matches well is rare, even in our pre-existing massive mass antibody repertoire. Vaccines, which usually consist of a weakened virus or fragments of a virus, train the body to develop a blocking antibody, which binds to the neutralizer of the real pathogen when we find it in the world. This is known as active immunity. The body’s immune system goes to basic training and emerges with adequate combat strength. Instead, antibody therapies like the ones Mascola worked on for HIV give you passive immunity: a mercenary army is introduced into your body to temporarily do the work for you.
The discovery of passive immunity dates back to the late 19th century, when Emil Behring, a German scientist with sad, hooded eyes and a trimmed beard, began injecting 220 children’s blood into children. All the children had contracted diphtheria, a terrible disease that slowly suffocated their victims. Behring had been trying to treat the disease, experimenting with rabbits, guinea pigs, goats and horses, giving infected animals the blood of the recovered. I didn’t know why, but the sick animals got better. So he gave the children the blood of animals exposed to diphtheria, and in 1894 he published the results: about twice as many children as would normally be expected to actually survive. Behring’s approach to “serum therapy” was considered such a success that he later received the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.