'A beautiful soul': Funeral held for baby boy killed in wrong-way crash on Highway 401
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
Scientists in the U.K. are developing a “potentially significant” treatment for COVID-19 that could be administered to patients in the form of a nasal spray, thanks to the tiny antibodies produced by a llama.
According to research from the Rosalind Franklin Institute, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, the treatment has the potential to prevent and treat COVID-19.
“While vaccines have proven extraordinarily successful, not everyone responds to vaccination and immunity can wane in individuals at different times,” James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, who helped lead the research, said in a statement.
“Having medications that can treat the virus is still going to be very important, particularly as not all of the world is being vaccinated at the same speed and there remains a risk of new variants capable of bypassing vaccine immunity emerging.”
To develop the treatment, researchers injected a llama named Fifi with a tiny, non-infectious piece of purified spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus – the virus that causes COVID-19.
The scientists chose a llama specifically because of the species’ unique ability to produce tiny single-domain antibodies – or nanobodies – in response to an infection. Other camelids including alpacas and camels, and even sharks, can produce these nanobodies too.
Due to their small size, these nanobodies are able to bind more tightly to the SARS-CoV-2 virus than larger antibodies produced by humans. Once the nanobodies have latched on to the invading virus, the body’s immune system flags it for destruction.
Steven Kerfoot, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Western University in London, Ont., who was not involved in the research, said the big advantage of these smaller nanobodies is their ability to squeeze into tight spaces on a virus protein. He also said they’re much easier to produce in a lab than human antibodies.
“It’s a lot easier to put together, a lot less complicated, and it's smaller, and can really sort of get into that binding spot quite well,” Kerfoot told CTVNews.ca during a telephone interview on Thursday. “So there are some real advantages for this particular approach.”
Ray Owens, head of protein production at the Rosalind Franklin Institute and lead author of the research, agreed the nanobodies have a number of advantages over human antibodies.
“Nanobodies have a number of advantages over human antibodies,” Ray Owens, head of protein production at the Rosalind Franklin Institute and lead author of the research, said in a statement.
“They are cheaper to produce and can be delivered directly to the airways through a nebuliser or nasal spray, so can be self-administered at home rather than needing an injection.”
Throughout the pandemic, human antibodies have been used to treat serious cases of COVID-19, but they typically need to be administered by intravenous infusion in the hospital. The nanobodies, on the other hand, could be delivered in the form of a simple nasal spray.
“This could have benefits in terms of ease of use by patients but it also gets the treatment directly to the site of infection in the respiratory tract,” Owens added.
Returning to Fifi the llama, after the animal was injected with a small piece of the virus’ spike protein, its immune system was triggered to fight off the virus protein by generating nanobodies against it. Following this, the researchers took a sample of Fifi’s blood and purified four nanobodies from it that were capable of binding to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
These nanobodies were then engineered in a lab into chains of three to increase their ability to bind to the virus.
Llamas have the unique ability to produce tiny single-domain antibodies – or nanobodies – in response to an infection. (Jo Kelly / Rosalind Franklin Institute)
The team found that three of the chains were able to neutralize the original variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Alpha variant, while a fourth chain was effective in neutralizing the Beta variant.
When one of the chains of nanobodies was tested in hamsters infected with COVID-19, the rodents showed a “marked reduction” in disease, lost far less weight than those that weren’t treated, and a had a lower viral load in their lungs and airways after seven days compared to those left untreated.
While the treatment has only been tested in animals, Public Health England said it was among the “most effective” SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing treatments they have ever tested.
“Although this research is still at an early stage, it opens up significant possibilities for the use of effective nanobody treatments for COVID-19,” Miles Carroll, Deputy Director of the National Infection Service, Public Health England (PHE), said.
Kerfoot said the idea of using antibodies from llamas and other animals in the camelid family is not new and has been in development for some time, but he’s not aware of its use in human treatment yet. He said the pandemic might provide the right impetus to further the research along, as it was for the mRNA technology now used in COVID-19 vaccines.
“If this becomes an approach that we can use to try and lessen the severity of respiratory viruses, there could be a lot of benefit to that. It's just not something that has made the leap to human treatment yet and this may be the push that sort of pushes it over that edge,” he said.
As for next steps, the team of researchers, which included scientists from the University of Liverpool, University of Oxford and PHE, are hoping to obtain funding in order to conduct clinical studies in humans. They also hope their nanobody technology might one day be used as a “platform technology” to fight off other diseases.
“When a new virus emerges in the future, the generic technology we have developed could respond to that, which would be important in terms of producing new treatments as quickly as possible,” Owens said.
Kerfoot agreed that there is a lot of potential to use this approach as a standard treatment for other airway diseases.
“There’s nothing special about SARS-CoV-2 that this approach wouldn't work for many of the other airway viruses,” he said. “I think there's certainly promise and the next step will have to be moving into human trials.”
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
There has been a "sophisticated" cybersecurity breach detected on B.C. government networks, Premier David Eby confirmed Wednesday evening.
Toronto police say a man was taken into custody outside Drake's Bridle Path mansion Wednesday afternoon after he tried to gain access to the residence.
U.S. President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel, which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.
Rookie goalie Arturs Silovs will start in net for the Canucks as Vancouver kicks off a second-round series against the Edmonton Oilers Wednesday night.
One of the Indian nationals accused of murdering British Columbia Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar says in a social media video that he received a Canadian study permit with the help of an Indian immigration consultancy.
Pfizer has agreed to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits about cancer risks related to the now discontinued heartburn drug Zantac, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the deal.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault is defending his comments about a new history museum after he was accused by a prominent First Nations group of trying to erase their history.
Independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a parasite in his brain more than a decade ago, but has fully recovered, his campaign said, after the New York Times reported about the ailment.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.