FLICKR, NIAIDWith the death toll from Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) rising in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and, most recently, South Korea, researchers are scrambling to develop a treatment that can slow the coronavirus. This week (June 29), researchers at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and the University of Maryland announced progress on this front: antibody-based technology, which has been used to design experimental treatments against Ebola, has yielded a treatment that can tackle MERS in mice. The group published their results in the PNAS.
“Instead of just trying to invent new drugs, we also invent new technologies that enable us to make new drugs more reliably and more rapidly,” Neil Stahl, Regeneron’s executive vice president of research and development, told MIT Technology Review.
First, the researchers had to establish a mouse model of MERS by genetically engineering the animals to express human immune receptors. “Mice are typically not susceptible to MERS,” coauthor Matthew Frieman, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of the Maryland School of Medicine, said in a press release. “This new mouse model will significantly boost our ability to study potential treatments and help scientists to understand how the virus causes disease in people.”
The team then screened some 1,000 antibodies that bind ...
