[maxharris]

How many months or years does that process take?

Morally speaking, the judgement of a patient (and the physician he has chosen) must not be impeded even for an instant. The FDA renders individual judgement on these matters irrelevant, and the result is often death and slowed medical progress.

[wwwtyro]

I imagine these people are desperate enough to find other means to acquire an antibody that blocks CD47. I wonder what quasi- or il- legal means are available to them? Care to speculate?

Edit: perhaps a set of crowd-sourced, extremely explicit instructions about how to manufacture, purify, and test such antibodies would be a start. With such a set of instructions, they might be able to find experts to help them under the table.

[maxharris]

Well, you could try ordering from Fischer or any of the usual research supply places out there, but they will not ship to a non-institutional address.

Even theft isn't an option here, unless you're somehow certain that a particular lab has exactly the right antibody. (In my lab, we often have trouble keeping track of that for ourselves...)

And don't forget that you need to be able to maintain sterile conditions, and have whatever other reagents you need to dilute things, etc.

[wwwtyro]

Wait - are you saying people could (were it legal) simply order this stuff from a company? Can you give me some kind of reference for this? If so, I could see people reaching out and finding others capable of placing the order.

[maxharris]

Here's CD47, conjugated to a fluorophor (when you have a cell covered in a conjugated antibody, it fluoresces when exposed to laser light - this is done so that an instrument called a flow cytometer can identify cells).

http://www.biolegend.com/percp-cy55-anti-human-cd47-4338.htm...

Of course, to get CD47 depletion, you'd probably want an antibody that isn't conjugated (functional grade):

http://www.ebioscience.com/resources/in-vivo-use-of-antibodi...

Also, some more help on the terminology: CD47 (and most, if not all molecules that fall under the Cluster of Differention [CD] nomenclature) vary on a per-species basis. So an antibody that targets CD47 in mice is not going to stick to human CD47. "Anti-" in this context means that the antibody in question will stick to specific molecule in the species that comes after the "anti-".

Note what it says on the bottom of the page. That's there because of regulations.

[wwwtyro]

Perfect, thanks for all this.

[car]

Strong word of warning! These antibodies are not human, but most likely mouse. They will illicit a strong immune response, since they are foreign to the human immune system. Furthermore, antibodies can be directed against many different locations on their target molecule (epitopes), CD47 in this case, and therefore it is very unlikely that they will compete with the ligand they are trying to block.

In brief: you will hurt people doing this and achieve nothing.

[wwwtyro]

Thank you.

[ceejayoz]

I'm only aware of the process because of a NYTimes (IIRC) article, which said they had a roughly two week wait for approval. Getting the pharmaceutical company to provide the med was significantly harder.