Zaray Miranda is a young Costa Rican doctor who is contributing to a research at the Austral University of Chile that proposes the use of nanoantibodies from Chilean alpacas as a low-cost treatment for patients with COVID-19. The procedure was announced by the scientific journal Scientific Reports, of the British publishing group Nature.
Doctor Miranda, who is a graduate of the University of Costa Rica, helped to achieve this scientific achievement that today is positioned in the international arena as a fast, cheap and simple method aimed at selecting the nanoantibodies with the greatest capacity to neutralize the virus.
Viable treatment against COVID-19
“The important thing here is that we innovate in the selection of nanoantibodies with a low-cost method. At present, isolating specific antibodies against the protein that allows COVID-19 to enter the human cell may be essential in the development of effective diagnostic and therapeutic tools. For this reason, we wanted to contribute and share this knowledge with the international scientific community”, said Miranda in an interview with her alma mater.
Immunotherapy
To achieve this, scientists worked for more than a year with the obligation to verify the neutralization power of alpaca nanoantibodies that actually inhibited the infectious capacity of COVID-19. The results obtained by the team are so encouraging, that the researchers have already advanced to another little-explored level: linking the nanoantibody of these animals with the human antibody.
The idea is to soon translate this innovation into the generation of injectable immunotherapy, which serves to reduce the severity of the disease in patients diagnosed early and who have a high probability of dying from their underlying pathologies.
