A mix of ultrapotent antibodies from recovered COVID-19 patients has been shown to recognise and lock down the infection machinery of the pandemic coronavirus and keep it from entering cells. Each of the antibody types performs these overlapping tasks slightly differently.
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Low doses of these antibodies, individually or as a cocktail, were also shown to protect hamsters from infection when exposed to the coronavirus by preventing it from replicating in their lungs.
An advantage of such cocktails is that they might also prevent the natural mutant forms of the virus that arose during this pandemic to escape treatment. As some variants in the infection machinery have already been discovered during the coronavirus pandemic, using a mix of antibodies allows for neutralization of a broad spectrum of such viral variants.