Sotrovimab can reduce chances of Covid death by up to 85 per cent…

Abu Dhabi has become the first place in the world to receive a consignment of Sotrovimab, the antiviral drug signed off for by UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP) for use in cases of covid-19 infection.

It is now available to certain categories of Covid-19 patients in the UAE.

You might also like

The world's first Covid-19 treatment has been approved by the UAE

How does it work..?

Sotrovimab is a monoclonal antibody treatment that is administered by intravenous (IV) drip.

If you’re curious about what a monoclonal antibody is, it gets pretty complicated fast, so we’ll try and gloss over the deep science. Most of you will be familiar with the concept of antibodies, they are our body’s microscopic imperial guard. Little Y-shaped proteins spat out by your immune system’s force of white blood cells in response to the invading threat of foreign proteins, such as bacteria or viruses. The antibodies latch onto receptors of the invading forces, stop them from working properly, and hopefully wipe them all out.

Monoclonal antibodies are a way of being a bit more targeted, outsourcing the early stages of the fight to a biotech laboratory. A live culture of white blood cells are presented with a foreign protein (in this case, the Covid-19 virus). The process is repeated many times, and in the experiments where the right antibodies are produced to combat the virus — those white blood cells are removed and cloned. Once you’ve done that, you have yourself a little antibody factory, where the proteins can be harvested and shipped off for use as transferable treatments.

Monoclonal antibodies are highly effective against some pathogens, but its not a universal magic bullet treatment at the moment. That being said, Sotrovimab has been shown to “prevent hospitalisation and death in 85 per cent of early selected treatment cases and can work on all known variations to date.”

And those are some pretty good stats.

Images: What’s On Archive/Getty