[fabian2k]

They're far too large and complex to be synthesized from scratch, that is simply not possible.

They are produced in various biological systems, with nature doing the synthesis. As far as I understand you can scale that up reasonably well with some effort.

[johnthealy3]

To add to this, you don't even need to know what the antibody looks like, or even if it exists. Very simplified example: It's possible to grow a dish of cancer cells (because they divide quickly and are immortal, e.g HeLa cells), "purify" away everything that isn't protein (cell lysis), then run the proteins through a gel that separates them by size (Western blot). Comparing these to a control will show you which proteins enabled survival, which gives you your candidates for sequencing and further tests.

However, right now we have humans synthesizing large amounts of antibodies that are proven to work (because the humans creating them survived and cleared the virus). It may ultimately be faster to isolate antibodies from the serum and engineer cell cultures (through adding DNA to them, "recombinant DNA") to create more of those antibodies, resulting in much stronger synthesis of a single antibody (so-called "monoclonal antibody drugs").

It's nearly certain that both of these are happening many times over around the world right now. All of the science here was already in lab use the first time I worked in a bio lab in 2003, and nowadays we have methods that didn't exist then (such as CRISPR for DNA manipulation and fast sequencing of both nucleic acids and proteins).

[Symmetry]

It's too large and complex to do now but I bet we'll be able to do that sort of thing by 2040.

[koheripbal]

The reason it's not researched much is because giving someone an antibody will not confer immunity - it will only treat the immediate virus.

It has value, but there are usually better treatments available that more broadly fight a variety of viruses and don't need to be so specifically customized as an antibody.

[dukoid]

I suppose testing would be easier for a cure (compared to a vaccine)? Given that only the "adapter" needs to be specialized, I was wondering why there don't seem to be any approaches based on antibody mass-production....

[woofie11]

I have a friend who runs a company which genetically engineers cells to make chemicals for a living. This doesn't seem like 2040-era science fiction.

Indeed, I'm not sure it's out-of-scope for 2020-era technology.

[nojvek]

What is the said company ?

[woofie11]

Ginko Bioworks.

Apparently it's grown quite a bit since I've spoken to my friend. When we last checked in, it was a little startup. Now, it's a $2.4 billion dollar operation. I guess my friend is probably worth a few hundred million right now.

[est31]

Maybe even by 2030 if the coronavirus causes an expansion of research. Which it'll likely do.