Tel Aviv University Study Finds Two Antibodies that can Find all COVID Strains

According to Israeli scientists, they have managed to identify such powerful antibodies for neutralizing COVID-19 that they would eliminate the requirement of getting any more booster shots.

The antibodies

Tel Aviv University’s research team did experiments with a wide array of antibodies and discovered that there were two that were able to neutralize every known strain of COVID-19 in a lab setting, including Delta and Omicron.

Some patients of the coronavirus are already treated with antibody infusions.

Dr. Natalia Freund, a microbiologist directing the new stated that the antibodies they had identified could be used for developing a rather powerful infusion.

Taking the performance of the antibodies in lab conditions into account, it was apparent that they could offer the extra protection that is usually provided via booster shots.

She added that this would mean that vaccinated people would not have to get extra shots. Freund stated that the coronavirus is known for causing serious illness.

She went on to say that the spread of the virus can be controlled when antibodies are provided in the first couple of days of infection.

Therefore, she stated that effective antibody treatment would mean that there would not be any need for providing booster doses to the whole population whenever a new variant is identified.

The process

Freund explained that on a technical level, the two antibodies had managed to achieve success because they would bind to a different part of the COVID-19 spike protein, as opposed to others.

The latest research from Freund has come from investigations that she had begun in October 2020 in her lab. It has been peer-reviewed recently and also published in Communications Biology.

She worked with doctoral students Ruofan Lee and Michael Mor for sequencing the B immune system cells obtained from the blood of patients who had recovered from the original COVID-19 strain.

They were able to identify nine antibodies that were produced by the patient. They tested the top two antibodies against a number of variants and did well against all of them.

The results

Freund said that the findings of the study revealed that TAU-1109, the first antibody, was able to neutralize the Omicron strain by almost 92%, while the effectiveness was 90% in the case of Delta.

The second antibody was named TAU-2310, which was 84% effective in neutralizing the Omicron variant and 97% effective in neutralizing the Delta variant.

They have named the antibodies TAU because it was the research team from Tel Aviv University that was able to identify them.

In order to confirm that she had done the lab work correctly, Freund had opted to send the antibodies to University of California San Diego.

This was to check them against live viruses and they were also sent to the medical facility of Ben-Ilan University in the Galilee.

Her findings were corroborated by these studies as well. She said that antibodies can undoubtedly offer strong protection because they can also prevent infection once you have recovered from the virus.