A recently released academic review of 37 randomised trials examines the effectiveness of neutralising antibodies for Covid-19, and reports good news for the effectiveness of Covimmune™, Aegros’ first hyperimmune product.
Reviewed by Aegros’ Medical team, an outline of this important paper is below.
Source: Determinants of passive antibody effectiveness in SARS-CoV-2 infection | medRxiv
Review:
Accumulated data demonstrates that neutralising antibodies are strongly correlated with protection from symptomatic and severe outcomes in COVID-19. This study, co-authored by eminent Australian haematologists, and leading scientists from the Kirby Institute UNSW, integrates data from 37 randomised controlled trials to investigate how the timing and dose of passive antibodies predicts protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection, and provides a quantitative framework to help guide future rational testing and deployment of this important therapeutic modality.
Overall the study demonstrates that “treatment either prophylactically or early in the course of infection is a major determinant to achieving protection with passive antibody administration in COVID-19.”
The authors caution that “a major factor that will affect future use of antibody therapies is the recognition of SARS-CoV-2 variants with different degrees of immune escape from neutralising antibodies. SARS-CoV-2 neutralising monoclonal antibodies … each target a single SARS-CoV-2 epitope, making them vulnerable to immune escape by viral variants.”
An alternative approach suggested by the authors is using “…convalescent plasma from individuals infected with Omicron (or vaccinated with a variant-specific vaccine) may be expected to be more specific to the Omicron variants. Thus, studies are needed to assess the variant-specific titre of different CP or hyperimmune immunoglobulin pools against future SARS-CoV-2 variants to predict their effectiveness.”
Aegros is currently delivering such a study assessing our hyperimmune immunoglobulin product CovimmuneTM manufactured from variant-specific plasma which contains high titres of polyclonal neutralising antibodies directed specifically against the prevailing SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern.
Importantly, the authors conclude by observing that “despite the availability of effective vaccines for COVID-19, a significant population of elderly or immunosuppressed individuals may be unable to fully benefit from existing vaccines. Passive antibody therapy has the potential to be used either prophylactically or therapeutically in this population.”