Scientists have come a step closer to creating a "universal antibody cocktail" that could treat every variant of Covid.
The antibody, called 1301B7, targets a region of the spike protein responsible for enabling the virus to bind and enter a cell. By targeting this region, the antibodies can stop the virus before they infect a cell.
Antibodies are part of the human immune system that track, bind to and destroy material like viruses and bad bacteria.
While existing antibody treatments have helped many patients with Covid, some treatments have not worked because the virus evolved and the antibodies could no longer physically bind to the targeted region.
Several different strains of Covid developed during the course of the pandemic, some of which adapted to evade the immunity conferred by vaccines.
The omicron variant, which first emerged in Botswana in 2021, remains the dominant global strain of the virus and has since evolved into subvariants.
The 1301B7 antibody was designed by a consortium of scientists at Texas Biomedical School Research Institute, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Columbia University.
For their research, the team tested the antibody against several variants including the original Covid variant found in Wuhan as well as omicron and SARS-CoV, the virus which caused the SARS outbreak.
Luis Martinez-Sobrido, a Professor at Texas Biomed and co-lead author of the research, said: "This antibody worked against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, omicron and SARS-CoV, providing strong evidence that this antibody will continue to work against future strains, especially if paired with other antibodies.
"A single antibody therapy is not going to work, so we may have to try something similar to therapies being developed for other diseases like Ebola and HIV whereby two or three antibodies are combined to target different regions of the virus."
Designing a vaccine that induces the 1301B7 antibody means that scientists would not have to continually update Covid jabs to evade new variants, he added.
Last month, pharmaceutical giant Astrazeneca announced that the Covid vaccine it developed during the pandemic would be withdrawn from the market due to the rise of new Covid variants that required different jabs.
