UNBC professor commends Vancouver-based AbCellera for COVID-19 antibody research

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On Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the federal government’s $175 million investment into Vancouver-based AbCellera Biologics, stating they’ve identified antibodies that could be used in drugs to fight COVID-19.

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“They’ve identified antibodies that could be used in drugs to treat this virus,” said Trudeau outside of Rideau Cottage. “This new funding will help them continue their vital work and will support human trials beginning as early as July.”

It’s no easy process, but it’s a technology like that of Vancouver-based AbCellera Biologics that Rader says makes it far quicker.

“One of the really interesting things about this company in Vancouver – AbCellera Biologics Inc. – is that they have a very powerful technology for looking at individual cells.”

Normally, Rader says if you were wanting to look if a person has an immune response, a doctor would take a blood sample and conduct some sort of test for those antibodies. However, the difficulty with those tests is that they’re reliant on quite an amount of material.

“What they can do is look at individual immune cells. So you have millions of these cells circulating your body at a time, but only a few of them might have the antibody that you’re interested in finding, so it’s a real “needle in a haystack” problem in that you’re needing to sort through lots and lots of stuff. Because of this very advanced technology that they have, they can screen millions of these cells and find the ones that have the strongest response, and then go in and sequence the DNA in those cells and identify the antibody which that cell is making.”

Once an antibody has been identified, which Trudeau claims AbCellera has, Rader suggests it’s about scaling-up and developing the materials either for the vaccination or the antibody test.

“Usually this takes 10 or 20 years when a company works to develop a vaccine, so the fact that companies are trying to do it in a matter of months is truly incredible,” says Rader.