Glanville, founding partner and CEO of a biotech company called Distributed Bio, and a group of employees began working on a treatment January 25, 2020. According to the company's website:3

"Our strategy was to engineer a panel of anti-SARS antibodies to make them recognize and block the novel coronavirus. The result of that work is a panel of ultra-high affinity therapeutic antibodies to neutralize SARS-CoV-2 (the virus behind COVID-19).

The work leveraged both the Distributed Bio SuperHuman 2.0 human antibody discovery technology and the Tumbler computational antibody optimization technology to discover thousands of antibodies against a novel virus in 9 weeks."

How the Antibody Treatment Works

In a March 31, 2020, interview, Glanville explained how his company came up with the treatment:4

" … My team has successfully taken five antibodies that back in 2002 were determined to bind and neutralize, block and stop the SARS virus … The new virus is a cousin of the old SARS.

So, what we've done is we've created hundreds of millions of versions of those antibodies, we've mutated them a bit, and in that pool of mutated versions, we found versions that cross them over … They bind on the same spot as the new virus, Covid-19.

It binds [to] the spot that the virus uses to gain entry into your cells. It blocks that. At this point we know it binds the same spot extremely tightly with high affinity. The next step is we send the antibodies to the military, and they will directly put those on the virus and show that it blocks its ability to infect cells."

As reported by Fox News,5 the antibody therapy essentially circumvents the need for a vaccine. "Instead of giving you a vaccine and waiting for it to produce an immune response, we just give you those antibodies right away … so within about 20 minutes, that patient has the ability to neutralize the virus," Glanville said.

According to Glanville, the completed drug will be tested for efficacy by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), while the Charles River Laboratories will conduct safety testing.6

According to the New York Post,7 human trials may begin at the end of the summer. At best, the drug might be released in September for compassionate use, Glanville says, which means patients can get the drug outside a clinical trial. When asked about Glanville's claims, Dr. Anthony Fauci replied that the use of monoclonal antibodies is "an old concept" and that pursuing it was "the right thing to do."8

Malaria Drugs Show Promise Against COVID-19