Sinopharm Photo:VCG

A Chinese research team has discovered a neutralizing antibody that is likely to be able to fight against most current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants, bringing more COVID-19 candidate therapies to the country, where six drugs have been domestically developed.

The drug, named DXP-604 based on a neutralizing antibody, was developed by a research team led by Xie Xiaoliang, director of the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics at Peking University.

It was used on some patients at the Beijing Ditan Hospital and proved able to significantly lower the viral load in patients' bodies and greatly relieve symptoms such as suffocating, and taste and smell declines, the Science and Technology Daily reported Thursday.

The working theory of antibody-based drugs is to prevent a virus from binding with receptors in human cells, a Beijing-based immunology expert told the Global Times on Thursday.

Zhuang Shilihe, an expert based in Guangzhou, told the Global Times that antibody drugs are usually used in curing mild and medium cases of diseases, but they are less effective in tackling immunoreaction and hyper-inflammation in severe cases.

Such drugs are also comparative highly priced, which is one difficulty in promoting them, Zhuang noted.      

The patients were given the drug on a compassionate use basis, an option to treat patients with life-threatening conditions with investigational medical products outside of clinical trials when there are no other comparable or satisfactory alternatives available. Some of the patients have been discharged from the hospital.

Xie told the Science and Technology Daily that the drug can take effect with a dose of only about 0.6 grams. It is effective in preventing most SARS-CoV-2 variants, according to testing that the team conducted on more than 4,000 possible mutations of the virus, Xie noted.

The Beijing municipal authority has approved DXP-604 for compassionate use in treatment of COVID-19 patients. The team is conducting phase II clinical trial on the Chinese mainland and looks forward to promoting overseas phase III clinical trials under cooperation with China National Biotec Group, a Sinopharm subsidiary that has also developed two COVID-19 drugs. 

Xie said that the price of the drug would be only one-third that of similar candidates.

So far, China has deployed three technical routes in developing COVID-specific drugs - blocking virus entry into cells, inhibiting virus replication, and adjusting the human immune system. The three approaches have their respective advantages and strategies in dealing with the coronavirus. 

In total, Chinese research teams have developed six candidate drugs, China Central Television said.

Among them, a neutralizing monoclonal antibody combination therapy co-developed by Tsinghua University, the Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen and Brii Biosciences, a company that has dual headquarters in China and the US, is expected to become the first in the country to get approval for market use in December. It's also likely to be the first to receive emergency use authorization in developed countries such as the US.

According to the developers, the therapy BRII-196/BRII-198 demonstrated a statistically significant reduction of 78 percent in the hospitalization and death in phase III clinical trials conducted in the US, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina and the Philippines.