Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day thirty seven since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story, people who have recovered from COVID nineteen may be able to help others who have the illness in a bold new way. They can donate their blood plasma to have it injected directly into patients. But researchers first have to figure out exactly how to harness antibodies, those magical proteins in the blood of recovered patients. But first, here's what
happened today. Just a few days after President Donald Trump insisted he had absolute authority to reopen the economy, he issued guidelines that put the onus on governors and businesses to make the tough calls. Trump released a brief document that suggested what state should consider as they decide whether to relax stay at home orders or other virus containment measures, but the difficult decisions were largely left to state houses.
The president set no deadlines, demanded no particular action, and offered little federal assistance. Included in the guidelines is the instruction that state should plan to independently secure protective gear and medical equipment for their hospitals. The guidelines did not set out a plan for dramatically ramping up testing and contact tracing, something experts say should be a prerequisite for relaxing lockdowns. On the science front, there is promising development
in the quest to return to normal life. A coronavirus vaccine could be in production by September. Researchers at the University of ox Heard are testing of vaccine they hope will show results by the fall, and manufacturing is already under way. And finally, a glimpse of the economic havoc the coronavirus has reaked on China. The country's economy shrank last quarter for the first time in decades, following almost
seven percent from a year ago. With the disease spread around the world, China is counting on shaky local demand to prop up a recovery. Now to today's main story, there's a sliver of hope for people very ill with COVID nineteen. It's a bold new treatment that involves taking the blood plasma of people who have recovered from the disease and injecting it into people who are very sick.
The secret is in the antibodies. A protein that is produced when someone's immune system has fought the virus, But using antibodies to treat the sick is more complicated than just transferring them from one person to another. Bloomberg Senior editor Jason Gale reports on what researchers are doing to sift through the many antibodies out there and find the right ones to help people recover from being infected. Dr Erica Ulman Sapphire says her job is like military intelligence.
She's an immunologist and professor at the Lahoya Institute for Immunology, a nonprofit research center in San Diego, and her job is to find the weak spots in the most deadly viruses and exploit them using antibodies. So you know, when the military can figure out how to precisely drop a bomb and one particular bad guy is sitting in one particular chair, in one particular room, one particular compound without any collateral damage because somebody had a high resolution photographs.
So that's what we do for viruses. We take those incredibly high resolution photographs and three dimensions and figure out how do you work, what's your weak spot, where are you vulnerable? What happens if you put an animalty here. Erica has spent years in this field. In fact, she figured out a key step in how e Bowler invades cells. The discovery opened up a way for drug therapies that have greatly improved survival for people with a POLO with
the coronavirus. Currently, no drug is being proven to work against it, and a vaccine maybe at least a year away. That's why Erica says antibody infusions from survivors may work out to be the fastest life saving option when someone has recently survived the disease, especially of really new disease for which there aren't any other treatments, the blood of
those survivors could be something that helps somebody else. The survivors have those immune molecules in their blood, and the absence of any other medicine you can give somebody, you could offer them a survivor's blood and that gives them that immunity immediately but temporarily, but that could help. Erica says. Antibodies viruses by recognizing and latching onto them, and their job is to seek that out anchor onto it never
let go. And when they do that, they can mechanically and activate the pat so by grabbing onto it, they do what we call they neutralize it, meaning they could prevent the virus from attaching to yourself. The base does other things. The base says, I am attached to something that must be destroyed, and so it signals all of your other immunes, cells and immune centuries to come to the side of infection and destroy the virus or destroy the infected cell. So it's no longer a virus factory.
And those different kinds of activities are complementary. Knowing more about coronavirus antibodies will inform ways to make an optimal vaccine against it, but study results using antibodies to thwart the disease are still unclear. One such that he published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March reported the results of five critically ill COVID nineteen patients in China. These patients received blood components from five adults
who had recovered from the disease. The study didn't have a control lam, so there's nowhere to tell if the treatment made a difference. All five patients seem to improve, though Eric is working on a more sophisticated approach that will avoid some potential pitfalls and using the blood from just any survivor. The experiment in China was small and has some problems, she says. The first one is the risk it's blood from another human coming into your events.
The other thing is that it's limited in quantity. You only got so much below the gift. The third thing is that it's really quite variable. Some people make a very strong immune response, are there is a very weak immune response. Erica's work involves coming through the millions of antibodies that people have made to find the very very
best to three. The objective is to figure out what anybody treatments could best protect frontline healthcare workers and other people at risk of infection, as well as treat COVID maintained patients. My job is to be the clearing house of the world's antibodies, to gather them, to give them all code names, to make the study very fair, and organize an effort by which we compare them side by side to figure out what works, what's best, and why.
And my group will also be solving the molecular structures to figure out what do they look like and how do we put the other complementary therapy. Erica says, antibody therapies might be applied differently depending on the patient. So the different kinds of people that might want an antibody therapy could be a perfectly healthy health care worker that wants to stay that way, so a preventative, or it could be a person who has been newly infected but
they're vulnerable and so they really need a treatment. Or it could be somebody that's in full on serious disease. Okay, full on serious disease. You may want to control immune activity, but to prevent somebody from getting infected, it might want more of that activity, and so different antibody frameworks in different ways to engineer the antibody where you could dial
that up and turn it off. The ultimate goal would be a treatment mixture, called that a cocktail, but probably two different antibodies that would command the virus in different ways and might do different things, and the goal is to inactivate the virus two ways at once. Dozens of research groups are racing the pandemic to collect and incubate
thousands of antibodies. Erica says they'll send their best to her lab to evaluate in clinical trials, and the results should be no much sooner than parallel research into experimental vaccines dose take longer to develop because scientists need to first find a molecule that will safely and effectively trigger the kind of infection. Finding antibodies, Erica's lab is already screening, and the reason is faster is because an antibody is a natural human molecule. We understand how it works. We've
made them before. When you've made them before, it's easy to scale them up again. We understand how to evaluate them, we understand their pharmaco kinetics, we understand how they behave. It's faster, easier, and more straightforward to mobilize an antibody right away than something entirely new. To make this happen means a lot of lab work. Yeah, it's a lot of coffee. Eric's lab was recently given almost two million dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to evaluate
Canada antibodies in the fight against COVID nineteen. Patient studies will probably start within a few months after Eric's lab is identified the best ones to test. And that's our show for today. For more on the outbreak from one hundred and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com, slash Coronavirus and one small favor. If you appreciate show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more
listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is hosted by Me Laura Carlson. The show was produced by Me tophor Foreheaz, Jordan Gospoure, and Magnus Hendrickson. Today's main story was reported by Jason Gale. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Francesca Lead and Rick Shine. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.