The title is "Bispecific antibodies targeting the N-terminal and receptor binding domains potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern". Note that although the antibodies were only helpful before infection, "its therapeutic efficacy after infection was limited." Thus, it isn't a treatment. Also, this study was in mice, not humans, so this is something potentially for the future, not something you can use now.
Also of note because of recent political choices, these are humanized mice, meaning they're transgenic. They have a human ACE2 gene instead of the mouse ACE2 gene, which makes the human version of the enzyme that the COVID virus uses to enter cells. This isn't my exact field, so I'm not positive, but I remember hearing that all of the COVID mouse models require transgenic mice.
There's absolutely no problem with research on transgenic mice. Certain groups have been trying to claim that the US president confused "transgenic" and "trans(sexual|gender)" in his speech last week, but that is incorrect. There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice [1,2].
[2] Just to be clear: I have no opinion on this research, nor am I suggesting that it is wasteful. I'm just pointing out that the entire meme of "Trump confused transgenic har har har" is factually incorrect, and also deeply ironic.
I'm really sad about this. I'm ok with the use of clear and even fully colloquial language by officials, but find myself mourning this total loss of decorum. I grew up believing that our officials should strive to be role models. I feel that by shirking this expectation, the current administration is eroding a central pillar of government as a concept.
> There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice
this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded studies, and ctrl-F it for "gender", and then ctrl-F that list for "mice", you get a non-zero number of results.
of the $8 million they're claiming, $3.1 million went to “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”
so...they're studying asthma. using mice. who are given hormones. this is pretty far from the "they're making mice transgender" talking point.
if you read the abstract that they link to [0]:
> Starting around puberty and peaking during mid-life, women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men. Causes of these disparities remain unclear; however, studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli. Despite this, experimental models of asthma have not explored the contributions of sex hormones to inflammatory mechanisms in the female and male lung
asthma affects men and women differently, and they want to figure out why. specifically, they're trying to isolate the affects of hormones on lung tissue. that seems like a worthwhile subject to me? a simplistic understanding of biology would be that lungs are lungs, and the same between men and women. refining that understanding seems like a good goal for basic research to pursue.
if you continue reading the abstract, oh my god they mention that trans people exist
> and no studies have explored the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women
but...this just seems to me like the scientific method? they're trying to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as they can:
> In Aim 2, we will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol
if you want to study the effects of sex-specific hormones, it seems logical that you would neuter them first, so that they're not producing any hormones of their own, they're only receiving the ones that you inject them with.
so you have female mice, with ovaries removed, who are receiving replacement female hormones. and male mice, with testes removed, who are also receiving female hormones.
if you want to call that "transgender mice", sure, knock yourself out. what I see is just a scientific experiment where they're tried to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible.
now, why are they only doing it with female hormones (estradiol)? why aren't they doing the opposite experiment where the male and female gonadectomized mice are given testosterone? I don't know for certain, but the most likely explanation is that testosterone is a controlled substance in the US (due to its use by weightlifting bros), and so doing experiments with it would be more difficult because of the increased legal requirements.
You're kinda splitting hairs here which lends me to believe you also fail to grasp the reality of the situation. We have no idea if Trump really knows the difference between the words transgenic and transgender, but we know that these studies are mostly--if not completely--focused on aspects other than simply changing the sex of the mice. If I had to guess, the grant proposals probably contained enough woke buzzwords to make them appear to be such.
The way they complain about it though, it seems to me that they think mouse studies are done for the sake of mice. ‘Crazy woke liberals want to make even mice transgender.’ Is the whistle they’re blowing.
So far, there there are multiple replies to my comment arguing with me about something I didn't say (i.e. "the cited studies don't have anything to do with making mice transgender"). So yes, both sides are so eager to score points that they don't even bother to read anymore.
Sweet summer child. Sometimes the context of an argument is just as important. If the discussion is about somebody who died stabbed, bringing the argument that old doctors helped people by bloodletting, while technically correct, is not exactly helping.
dang, would you be able to update the title for this thread? The full title is too long for HN but could be shortened to: “Bispecific antibodies potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern”.
All variants? but N-Terminal is not immune to mutations and the specific antibody will drive evolutionary selection for those mutations - and rapid development of new variants
Antibodies are not vaccines. Antibodies bind to an antigen (virus component in this case) to get the immune system to attack and destroy the antigen and whatever it's attached to.
A vaccine causes the patient to develop specific immunity (fast reaction to a specific antigen) by introducing (usually injecting) a large amount of an antigen. That prompts the immune system to react by developing B-cells that produce their own antibodies to the antigen. It turns the body into its own antibody factory to deal with whatever you injected, but that takes time.
Injecting antibodies, as in this study, bypasses the natural (slow) specific immunity generation process. Antibodies are created some other way (in a lab, or in some other animal) and then directly injected. It's done for serious diseases or dangerous toxins or immuno-compromised individuals, when waiting for the patient to develop their own specific immunity is too slow or dangerous.
Critically, a vaccine allows the body to maintain the ability to fight off similar-enough infections for a while, but usually takes weeks or more to reach near full effect, sometimes requiring multiple shots for better effectiveness. If you're trying to treat an infection you think you might already have or will get in the next few days, vaccines only work if the progression of the disease is very slow, as in rabies which takes something like 1-2 months to make it into the CNS.
Injecting antibodies is a one-shot treatment that must be repeated until the virus (or toxin or other bad thing) is gone. It's commonly done for toxins (spider or snake venoms), or sometimes for severe diseases (ebola, tetanus), but sars-cov-2 has so much attention that now they're doing it for that too. In patients who aren't immunocompromised, antibody treatments for less-lethal infections give their immune systems more time to generate their own antibodies without developing severe symptoms.
The similarity in the two approaches is that they both ultimately involve antibodies binding to coronavirus proteins. The difference is in where those antibodies come from, and whether the body can produce more at will (vaccine --[time]--> natural immunity), or whether you have to keep injecting them (antibody treatments).
That's only a rough approximation. The immune system is very complicated. Wikipedia, or a book on molecular biology or immunology, will go into a lot more detail.
So it could be given eg daily prophylactically to health workers, and important functional workers during a breakout pandemic to ensure they can continue to work, with very high likelihood of exposure. If it meant less biohazard cosplay (really? it works but it's such a high burden to get right and its exhausting from what health workers say)
I'd say it's worth exploring on those grounds alone. Anything to keep health and vital service staff functional during the bad times.
Maybe there's a hypothetical where there's somehow rapid availability of specific antibodies, but no opportunity to vaccinate healthcare workers ahead of time, and it somehow makes sense to rely on antibody injections instead of PPE ("biohazard cosplay"). Here are some reasons why it probably doesn't.
Getting treated with antibodies don't mean you're asymptomatic or that you'll feel well. It only means you'll have less severe symptoms. You'd have healthcare workers walking around sick, spreading the very disease they're trying to treat others for. Or taking up a hospital or clinic bed, not treating patients, using up limited healthcare resources — which, for the duration of their illness, is a worse outcome for their patients than if the healthcare workers weren't there at all.
It's expensive. There's no economy of scale for an unusual disease outbreak. That applies to both antibody and vaccine stockpiles.
If the disease is minor (like COVID-19 usually is for otherwise healthy individuals), healthcare workers might be willing to take a chance to avoid the hassle of PPE, but would their employer (such as a hospital, or MSF)? They're the ones who have to pay for antibody treatment if their healthcare employees get sick. They're the ones who have medical ethicists looking out for both the well-being of the frontline healthcare workers and patients.
If the disease has a significant mortality rate, availability of a specific antibody treatment, even if it's stocked and instantly available, wouldn't motivate anyone to go without PPE. Nor would getting vaccinated. They're not guarantees of survival, and preventing healthcare workers from getting sick is more important than treating patients.
Yea I hadn't really thought it through. I went straight to a hallelujah outcome when most things "in mice" don't wash through, and are expensive. Disposable PPE is less expensive and we know it works. Sweaty and tiring, but works.
Not to mention, PPE protects you against diseases which aren't COVID-19 - the common cold, influenza, tuberculosis... health care workers are always going to be safer (and keep their patients safer!) by masking up.
You've got to be kidding. There's no way most healthcare workers will ever tolerate constantly wearing masks. Especially not for routine ambulatory care that doesn't involve breaking the skin.
No, this is a treatment. Vaccines are preventative by priming your immune system, this directly targets SARS-CoV-2 itself, so is for people who actively have COVID.
I think it's the thing the powers that be said was inconclusive and/or ineffective (monoclonal antibodies) and in the same realm of conspiracy theorist homeopathic solutions. Just takes awhile for things to work out, it's OK.
The HN community can be a good candidate to collectively, over time and use... develop and refine a set of commonly understood tags to communicate context in post titles.
If not in title, then maybe in the top / "pinned" comment.
If they can spread beyond HN... that would be even better.
The title is "Bispecific antibodies targeting the N-terminal and receptor binding domains potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern". Note that although the antibodies were only helpful before infection, "its therapeutic efficacy after infection was limited." Thus, it isn't a treatment. Also, this study was in mice, not humans, so this is something potentially for the future, not something you can use now.
Also of note because of recent political choices, these are humanized mice, meaning they're transgenic. They have a human ACE2 gene instead of the mouse ACE2 gene, which makes the human version of the enzyme that the COVID virus uses to enter cells. This isn't my exact field, so I'm not positive, but I remember hearing that all of the COVID mouse models require transgenic mice.
There's absolutely no problem with research on transgenic mice. Certain groups have been trying to claim that the US president confused "transgenic" and "trans(sexual|gender)" in his speech last week, but that is incorrect. There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice [1,2].
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...
[2] Just to be clear: I have no opinion on this research, nor am I suggesting that it is wasteful. I'm just pointing out that the entire meme of "Trump confused transgenic har har har" is factually incorrect, and also deeply ironic.
None of the titles of studies provided on that page support the assertion that the money was spent “for making mice transgender.”
...I didn't say they did? Not sure why you're arguing with me. I just said that there's no "confusion" between these things and transgenic mice.
It is correct, as the White House's childish response doesn't address "making mouses transgender" at all, and this was Trump's claim.
Their wording is very convincing that they are correct, too:
> The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).
I had to double check this was really posted on whitehouse.gov.
I'm really sad about this. I'm ok with the use of clear and even fully colloquial language by officials, but find myself mourning this total loss of decorum. I grew up believing that our officials should strive to be role models. I feel that by shirking this expectation, the current administration is eroding a central pillar of government as a concept.
> There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice
this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded studies, and ctrl-F it for "gender", and then ctrl-F that list for "mice", you get a non-zero number of results.
of the $8 million they're claiming, $3.1 million went to “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”
so...they're studying asthma. using mice. who are given hormones. this is pretty far from the "they're making mice transgender" talking point.
if you read the abstract that they link to [0]:
> Starting around puberty and peaking during mid-life, women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men. Causes of these disparities remain unclear; however, studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli. Despite this, experimental models of asthma have not explored the contributions of sex hormones to inflammatory mechanisms in the female and male lung
asthma affects men and women differently, and they want to figure out why. specifically, they're trying to isolate the affects of hormones on lung tissue. that seems like a worthwhile subject to me? a simplistic understanding of biology would be that lungs are lungs, and the same between men and women. refining that understanding seems like a good goal for basic research to pursue.
if you continue reading the abstract, oh my god they mention that trans people exist
> and no studies have explored the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women
but...this just seems to me like the scientific method? they're trying to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as they can:
> In Aim 2, we will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol
if you want to study the effects of sex-specific hormones, it seems logical that you would neuter them first, so that they're not producing any hormones of their own, they're only receiving the ones that you inject them with.
so you have female mice, with ovaries removed, who are receiving replacement female hormones. and male mice, with testes removed, who are also receiving female hormones.
if you want to call that "transgender mice", sure, knock yourself out. what I see is just a scientific experiment where they're tried to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible.
now, why are they only doing it with female hormones (estradiol)? why aren't they doing the opposite experiment where the male and female gonadectomized mice are given testosterone? I don't know for certain, but the most likely explanation is that testosterone is a controlled substance in the US (due to its use by weightlifting bros), and so doing experiments with it would be more difficult because of the increased legal requirements.
0: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526
You're kinda splitting hairs here which lends me to believe you also fail to grasp the reality of the situation. We have no idea if Trump really knows the difference between the words transgenic and transgender, but we know that these studies are mostly--if not completely--focused on aspects other than simply changing the sex of the mice. If I had to guess, the grant proposals probably contained enough woke buzzwords to make them appear to be such.
source: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
The way they complain about it though, it seems to me that they think mouse studies are done for the sake of mice. ‘Crazy woke liberals want to make even mice transgender.’ Is the whistle they’re blowing.
Our political discourse is especially stupid right now, and it is bi-partisan.
Drop the "both sides" falsehood.
So far, there there are multiple replies to my comment arguing with me about something I didn't say (i.e. "the cited studies don't have anything to do with making mice transgender"). So yes, both sides are so eager to score points that they don't even bother to read anymore.
Sweet summer child. Sometimes the context of an argument is just as important. If the discussion is about somebody who died stabbed, bringing the argument that old doctors helped people by bloodletting, while technically correct, is not exactly helping.
It's bi-partisan in the way that a paper cut is bi-partisan to having your leg dissolved off with acid.
We can find against the crazy right by making even more extreme strawmen.
dang, would you be able to update the title for this thread? The full title is too long for HN but could be shortened to: “Bispecific antibodies potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern”.
Mentions like @dang are npt magic in HN, but you can send an email to hn@ycombinator.com
All variants? but N-Terminal is not immune to mutations and the specific antibody will drive evolutionary selection for those mutations - and rapid development of new variants
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8647783/ search "N-Terminal"
What does this mean? A better vaccine?
Antibodies are not vaccines. Antibodies bind to an antigen (virus component in this case) to get the immune system to attack and destroy the antigen and whatever it's attached to.
A vaccine causes the patient to develop specific immunity (fast reaction to a specific antigen) by introducing (usually injecting) a large amount of an antigen. That prompts the immune system to react by developing B-cells that produce their own antibodies to the antigen. It turns the body into its own antibody factory to deal with whatever you injected, but that takes time.
Injecting antibodies, as in this study, bypasses the natural (slow) specific immunity generation process. Antibodies are created some other way (in a lab, or in some other animal) and then directly injected. It's done for serious diseases or dangerous toxins or immuno-compromised individuals, when waiting for the patient to develop their own specific immunity is too slow or dangerous.
Critically, a vaccine allows the body to maintain the ability to fight off similar-enough infections for a while, but usually takes weeks or more to reach near full effect, sometimes requiring multiple shots for better effectiveness. If you're trying to treat an infection you think you might already have or will get in the next few days, vaccines only work if the progression of the disease is very slow, as in rabies which takes something like 1-2 months to make it into the CNS.
Injecting antibodies is a one-shot treatment that must be repeated until the virus (or toxin or other bad thing) is gone. It's commonly done for toxins (spider or snake venoms), or sometimes for severe diseases (ebola, tetanus), but sars-cov-2 has so much attention that now they're doing it for that too. In patients who aren't immunocompromised, antibody treatments for less-lethal infections give their immune systems more time to generate their own antibodies without developing severe symptoms.
The similarity in the two approaches is that they both ultimately involve antibodies binding to coronavirus proteins. The difference is in where those antibodies come from, and whether the body can produce more at will (vaccine --[time]--> natural immunity), or whether you have to keep injecting them (antibody treatments).
That's only a rough approximation. The immune system is very complicated. Wikipedia, or a book on molecular biology or immunology, will go into a lot more detail.
So it could be given eg daily prophylactically to health workers, and important functional workers during a breakout pandemic to ensure they can continue to work, with very high likelihood of exposure. If it meant less biohazard cosplay (really? it works but it's such a high burden to get right and its exhausting from what health workers say)
I'd say it's worth exploring on those grounds alone. Anything to keep health and vital service staff functional during the bad times.
Maybe there's a hypothetical where there's somehow rapid availability of specific antibodies, but no opportunity to vaccinate healthcare workers ahead of time, and it somehow makes sense to rely on antibody injections instead of PPE ("biohazard cosplay"). Here are some reasons why it probably doesn't.
Getting treated with antibodies don't mean you're asymptomatic or that you'll feel well. It only means you'll have less severe symptoms. You'd have healthcare workers walking around sick, spreading the very disease they're trying to treat others for. Or taking up a hospital or clinic bed, not treating patients, using up limited healthcare resources — which, for the duration of their illness, is a worse outcome for their patients than if the healthcare workers weren't there at all.
It's expensive. There's no economy of scale for an unusual disease outbreak. That applies to both antibody and vaccine stockpiles.
If the disease is minor (like COVID-19 usually is for otherwise healthy individuals), healthcare workers might be willing to take a chance to avoid the hassle of PPE, but would their employer (such as a hospital, or MSF)? They're the ones who have to pay for antibody treatment if their healthcare employees get sick. They're the ones who have medical ethicists looking out for both the well-being of the frontline healthcare workers and patients.
If the disease has a significant mortality rate, availability of a specific antibody treatment, even if it's stocked and instantly available, wouldn't motivate anyone to go without PPE. Nor would getting vaccinated. They're not guarantees of survival, and preventing healthcare workers from getting sick is more important than treating patients.
Yea I hadn't really thought it through. I went straight to a hallelujah outcome when most things "in mice" don't wash through, and are expensive. Disposable PPE is less expensive and we know it works. Sweaty and tiring, but works.
Not to mention, PPE protects you against diseases which aren't COVID-19 - the common cold, influenza, tuberculosis... health care workers are always going to be safer (and keep their patients safer!) by masking up.
You've got to be kidding. There's no way most healthcare workers will ever tolerate constantly wearing masks. Especially not for routine ambulatory care that doesn't involve breaking the skin.
More like a better paxlovid.
> What does this mean? A better vaccine?
Probably eventually, yeah. Assuming all goes well with further research and development.
No, this is a treatment. Vaccines are preventative by priming your immune system, this directly targets SARS-CoV-2 itself, so is for people who actively have COVID.
Opposite.
Of course it is for therapeutics design, it's the literal last sentence of the abstract:
"In conclusion, NTD-RBD bsAbs offer promising potential for the design of resilient, next-generation antibody therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 VOCs."
I think it's the thing the powers that be said was inconclusive and/or ineffective (monoclonal antibodies) and in the same realm of conspiracy theorist homeopathic solutions. Just takes awhile for things to work out, it's OK.
Sign me up!
Needs an [in mice] tag
Maybe a [TRL x] tag too.
In the current online discourse climate...
The HN community can be a good candidate to collectively, over time and use... develop and refine a set of commonly understood tags to communicate context in post titles.
If not in title, then maybe in the top / "pinned" comment.
If they can spread beyond HN... that would be even better.
[dead]