From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 04:12:12 MDT
On Wed, 14 May 2003, John K Clark wrote:
> There have been reports that doctors in Hong Kong injected sick people with
> a serum that contains antibodies to the SARS virus taken from recovered Sars
> patients and it seemed to help. Robert I'd be interested to hear your
> opinion about that.
John, this would be consistent with standard "anti-venom" or "anti-toxin"
therapies. Patients who have "recovered" are likely to carry a high
titre of antibodies against the SARS virus -- these antibodies would
allow the immune system to more quickly and easily engulf and absorb
SARS virus particles reducing the spread of the infection. However
injecting antibodies across species or even between individuals in
the same species may be relatively problematic. While the protein
sequence and 3-D structure of the "common" part of antibodies is
relatively highly conserved (in contrast to the part of antibodies
that is designed to "vary" to match the infectious agent) I suspect
that efficacy may vary across species and individuals.
Rafal might be better able to comment on this -- it is a "reasonable"
strategy but one whose "success" may vary from case to case and be
very difficult to generalize. It may come down to a question of the
similarity between the immune systems of the donor and recipient
(similar to the issues involved in organ transplants). And we have
a long history of knowing how sometimes the transplants are successful
and sometimes they are not.
Robert
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