Coronavirus: Scientists who cloned Dolly the Sheep ‘in talks with government over potential virus treatment’

Hopes to develop therapy, which uses immune cells from healthy volunteers, by July

The scientists who famously cloned Dolly the Sheep are reportedly in talks with the government over a potential treatment for coronavirus patients that uses the immune cells from young and healthy volunteers.

Researchers from TC Biopharm, near Glasgow, have previously treated cancer patients with immunity-building cell infusions and are now hoping the same therapy will work against coronavirus, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Dr Brian Kelly, senior strategic medical adviser to TC Biopharm, said: “One of the key challenges of fighting viral infection is to develop something that is going to attack the infected cells and not the normal cells.

“So the solution that we came up with was to look at the body’s natural defences to viral infection.

“In patients who have successfully fought a viral infection, they have expanded their own immune system and that persists after that to stop them becoming infected again.”

Talks are underway with the government to trial the therapy and have it available in NHS hospitals by July.

The donor T-cells differ from normal immune cells as they do not identify invaders in the body based on alien protrusions on the surface of cells, but by detecting the unusual metabolism of viruses.

When the donor cells do detect a virus, they begin to destroy while also signalling it to the rest of the immune system as an alien intrusion requiring eradication.

Dr Kelly said with this approach, even if the virus mutated and returned to a body, the infusion exercise could be repeated and would still work.

TC Biopharm, a clinical-stage cell therapy company, was founded by Angela Scott, who was part of the team which cloned Dolly the Sheep at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh in 1996.

Other treatments for coronavirus are already being developed across the UK, with a small number of patients in England and Scotland currently trialling a drug known as remdesivir.

Remdesivir is manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Gilead, which specialises in producing anti-viral medications.

Hilary Hutton-Squire, the company’s general manager in the UK and Ireland, says the work behind the drug stretches back over ten years.

“Coronaviruses are an important category of virus because when we’ve seen them jump from animals to humans previously they’ve caused a lot of problems as with SARS and MERS,” she said.

“So remdesivir was a product we had looked at against SARS and MERS and seen that it had some activity, and that’s why we thought it was really important to see if it has a role to play in treating patients with COVID-19 as quickly as we can.”

Additional reporting by PA