San Francisco ‘Netflix Pandemic’ series scientist, Dr. Jacob Glanville, thinks he has discovered a potential cure for coronavirus (COVID-19) – Centivax.com
As the deadly coronovirus continues to claim tens of thousands of lives globally, scientists and doctors are working around the clock to find cure for the novel coronavirus. One of the doctors is San Francisco Netflix ‘Pandemic’ series doctor, Dr. Jacob Glanville, who thinks he found a cure for coronavirus (COVID-19). We wrote about Dr. Glanville about two weeks ago after his team announced they the new antibody therapy drug to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) patients.
Dr. Jacob Glanville and his team at biotech company Distributed Bio, are working on creating antibody to treat people that are already sick. Their idea behind the antibody his team is working is to bio engineer antibodies to fight COVID-19 by evolving known antibodies against SARS coronavirus that caused a pandemic scare about 20 years ago. Dr. Glanville is behind Centivax, a therapeutics company founded to treat and eradicate the remaining pathogens of the 21st century.
Today, Dr. Glanville tweeted that the new antibody therapy, which works by “blocking the novel coronavirus from infecting human cells,” is a “candidate cure” for the deadly bug that has swept 180 countries and territories. “After 9 weeks we have generated extremely potent picomolar antibodies that block known #neutralizing #ACE2 #epitopes, blocking the novel #coronavirus from infecting human cells. Read more at http://centivax.com,” Dr. Glanville said.
Anti-#COVID19 #therapeutic update. After 9 weeks we have generated extremely potent picomolar antibodies that block known #neutralizing #ACE2 #epitopes, blocking the novel #coronavirus from infecting human cells. Read more at https://t.co/Fht9buIZkU. pic.twitter.com/2v7NMk7kyZ
— Dr. Jacob Glanville (@CurlyJungleJake) April 1, 2020
The idea is to then extract five SARS-CoV-specific antibodies and mutate them into 1 billion different types to see whether there are any antibodies that bind to COVID-19. If the antibody matches the antigen sufficiently well, it will be mass-produced, he anticipated. Human trials could begin as early as this summer. If all goes well, a drug could be ready by this fall. Dr. Glanville confirmed mass production can be launched in August or September if his team identifies a potential antibody by April 6.
Dr. Jacob Glanville is a computational immuno-engineer and co-founder and CEO of Distributed Bio, a San Francisco, California-based immuno-engineering startup company that provides computational tools, antibody libraries, and more. The company is developing breakthrough technologies to drug previously challenging targets like GPCRs, ion channels, pMHC complexes, condition-specific binders, anti-idiotypes, and broadly neutralizing viral epitopes. Dr. Jacob Glanville is also featured in the Netflix series ‘Pandemic,’
In answering question from a local TV station about whether the United States is on the same as South Korea, China and Italy, Dr. Glanville answered: “We are no longer on the same trajectory that Italy experienced. There is still an outbreak. We will still experience doubling for the next few weeks, and that’s because this is a silent disease and many many subjects, they don’t experience symptoms but they can be infectious.”
Below is video of Dr. Glanville explaining how the antibody therapy drug his company is working on.