DNA and jolts of electricity get people to make optimal antibodies

One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our ability to develop therapies. But that doesn’t mean biotech has stood still; companies have been developing technologies that could allow us to rapidly respond to future threats.

There are a lot of ideas out there. But this week saw some early clinical trial results of one technique that could be useful for a range of infectious diseases. We’ll go over the results as a way to illustrate the sort of thinking that’s going on, along with the technologies we have available to pursue the resulting ideas.

The best antibodies

Any emerging disease leaves a mass of antibodies in its wake—those made by people in response to infections and vaccines, those made by lab animals we use to study the infectious agent, and so on. Some of these only have a weak affinity for the disease-causing agent, but some of them turn out to be what are called “broadly neutralizing.” These stick with high affinity not only to the original pathogen, but most or all of its variants, and possibly some related viruses.

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