SERUM provides the fabled, almost miracle cure for snake bite, and for diseases such as rabies and tetanus. Now this old-fashioned way of producing antibodies in another animal has produced an effective treatment for bird flu 鈥� at least in mice.
Jiahai Lu and colleagues at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, got horses to produce antibodies to H5N1 by injecting them with a vaccine designed for chickens. They then collected the horses鈥� blood and purified the part with the antibodies in. The serum buys time for infected people to make their own antibodies.
To see if the treatment would work, the team gave mice the antibodies 24 hours after they had been infected with what would normally be a lethal dose of H5N1. All the mice that got a big enough dose lived (Respiratory Research, DOI: 10.1186/1465-9921-7-43).
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In theory, such antibodies could be made quickly and cheaply against a pandemic strain of H5N1, potentially saving many lives and limiting the spread of the virus. The trouble is most drug companies have stopped making antibodies this way: the markets are in poor countries, offering low returns, and animal rights campaigners protest.
Companies have invested instead in making modern, monoclonal antibodies using cell cultures. 鈥淚t would be complex and expensive for a company to hugely scale up its monoclonal production to treat whole populations rather than a few people,鈥� says David Fedson, founder of the vaccine industry鈥檚 pandemic task force.
