Preliminary experiments suggest that most of the antibody treatments for the disease are powerless against Omicron, 1, 2, 3, 4.
Several publications posted on preprint servers report laboratory evidence that Omicron is totally or partially resistant to all currently available treatments based on these monoclonal antibodies. The publications have not yet been peer reviewed, but some of the companies that manufacture antibody therapies already concede that their products have lower potency against Omicron than against other variants.
The preprints report that only two antibodies show strong evidence of retaining some ability to thwart the variant: sotrovimab, developed by Vir Biotechnology in San Francisco, California, and GSK, headquartered in London; and DXP-604, which is undergoing clinical trials in China and was developed by BeiGene and Singlomics, both based in Beijing.
Some monoclonal-antibody treatments for COVID-19 consist of a single antibody; others of a cocktail of several. The details differ, but all of the monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 bind to the virus’s spike protein, preventing the virus from infecting human cells. The treatments reduce the risk of severe COVID-19 by up to 85%.
But when virologists saw that Omicron has a multitude of mutations concentrated on its spike protein, they feared what it would mean for these treatments. The outcome was even worse than they anticipated, says Olivier Schwartz, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a co-author of one of the preprints. “We didn’t expect to see such a shift in the antibodies’ effectiveness,” he told the journal Nature.
Links to Pre-prints:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.12.472269v2
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.21267772v1
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472630v1
https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.07.470392