Question

1) How can convalescent serum from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 be used to treat sick patients? What part of the serum might be beneficial to these patients?

2) I saw a report this week that the mutation rate for SARS-CoV-2 is much less than that of the influenza virus. How does this information impact the efficacy of any new vaccine?

3) Besides vaccination, what other therapies are being developed/tested? What do these therapies target in the virus?

Answer 1

1) The convalescent serum obtained form the patients who have recovered from COVID-19 can be used to treat the sick patients by obtaining the antibody rich plasma and injecting them into the sick and these antibodies will temporarily help in fighting the infection by acting against viral antigens. This therapy is known as plasma therapy.

2) As the mutation rate of the virus is less than that of the influenza virus, any vaccine developed against the COVID 19 antigen will be more effiecient in treating all the patients effectively and will be a stable vaccine which needs little or no modification in future.

3) Besides vaccination, antiviral drugs can be developed and Si RNA-based interference mechanism can be put into. RNA based therapy or gene silencing can work at the gene level and it will prevent the synthesis of proteins required for the Virus assemble inside the host. IN this case, a small RNA with complementary base sequence to the viral  mRNA is incorportaed which then form complementary base pairing with each other and thus prevents the Viral RNA from gets translated.