New Chinese Covid-19 antibody treatment shows promise, as China races to find a cure

Experimental neutralising antibody treatment able to tackle all variants shown to reduce viral loads and symptoms for 14 Beijing patients

The therapy fights mutations with a single antibody, which will help cut production costs by one third, an official newspaper reported

2-MIN READ2-MIN

The DXP-604 experimental treatment is based on a single neutralising antibody identified from the plasma of 60 recovering Covid-19 patients. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:24pm, 18 Nov 2021Updated: 9:43pm, 18 Nov 2021

An experimental Covid-19 antibody treatment authorised for compassionate use at a Beijing hospital has delivered promising results, state media reported.

This comes after Chinese authorities recently approved the compassionate use of DXP-604, a neutralising antibody treatment, for 14 Covid-19 patients at the Ditan Hospital in Beijing.

The therapy, administered by intravenous infusion, is based on an antibody identified by Sunney Xie Xiaoliang, director of the Beijing Advanced Innovation Centre for Genomics at Peking University, and his team.

Its use significantly reduced the viral load of the patients and relieved symptoms such as shortness of breath and loss of the senses of smell and taste, according to the official Science and Technology Daily. Some of the patients had already been discharged, it said.

Xie told a conference earlier this month that his team had identified a full spectrum antibody that could tackle all Covid-19 variants in laboratory tests. The antibody was isolated from the plasma of over 60 recovering patients.