Doctor from the Netflix show “Pandemic” claims to have found the cure for Covid-19

A San Francisco, California doctor featured in Netflix’s “Pandemic” series claims to have discovered a possible treatment for the new coronavirus.

Distributed Bio bioengineer and founder Jacob Glanville tweeted that he has found a new antibody therapy that works by “blocking the new coronavirus from infecting human cells.”

“I’m happy to report that my team has successfully taken five antibodies that back in 2002 were determined to bind and neutralize, block and stop the SARS virus,” Glanville told the Radio New Zealand program “Checkpoint.”

“We’ve evolved them in our laboratory, so now they very vigorously block and stop the SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] virus as well.”

Researchers — aware that COVID-19 “is a cousin of the old SARS” — created “hundreds of millions of versions” of antibodies for that virus, “mutated them a bit, and in that pool of mutated versions, we found versions that cross them over,” Glanville said on the radio program.

“So now we know they bind on the same spot as the new virus, COVID-19,” he continued. “It binds the spot that the virus uses to gain entry into your cells. It blocks that.”

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 bioengineer matched the antibodies to “sort of like a short-term vaccine, except it works immediately.” It would give the recipients protection for eight to ten weeks.

Glanville said the therapy could be given to a patient who was sick with Covid-19, and his body would be filled with antibodies useful in fighting the disease.

“Those antibodies will surround and stick all over a virus and make it so it’s no longer infectious. You could also give it to a doctor or a nurse or an elderly person and they would then have those antibodies in them that would prevent them from getting infected in the first place.”

The antibodies the California doctor has discovered will be sent to the U.S. Army’s Infectious Disease Medical Research Institute, which will begin “testing it for its ability to neutralize the virus,” Glanville said.

Human trials this summer

At the earliest, Glanville said, antibody treatment could be launched for compassionate use — the occasional allocation from the Food and Drug Administration for drug use outside of clinical trials — by September.

In “anticipation” of the research continuing well, the doctor said his company should “start increasing many more doses, hundreds of thousands to millions.”

Netflix released “Pandemic” on January 22, as the new coronavirus outbreak was spreading through China, just before the WHO declared the current outbreak a global pandemic.

The series focuses on doctors and scientists who are on the front lines of fighting the flu and trying to prevent a global pandemic.