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Ferritin as a Platform for Creating Antiviral Mosaic Nanocages: Prospects for Treating COVID‐19
Author(s) -
Honarmand Ebrahimi Kourosh
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
chembiochem
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.05
H-Index - 126
eISSN - 1439-7633
pISSN - 1439-4227
DOI - 10.1002/cbic.202000728
Subject(s) - nanocages , virology , antibody , covid-19 , ferritin , pandemic , virus , biology , computational biology , medicine , disease , infectious disease (medical specialty) , immunology , biochemistry , pathology , catalysis
Infectious diseases are a continues threat to human health and the economy worldwide. The latest example is the global pandemic of COVID‐19 caused by SARS‐CoV‐2. Antibody therapy and vaccines are promising approaches to treat the disease; however, they have bottlenecks: they might have low efficacy or narrow breadth due to the continuous emergence of new strains of the virus or antibodies could cause antibody‐dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection. To address these bottlenecks, I propose the use of 24‐meric ferritin for the synthesis of mosaic nanocages to deliver a cocktail of antibodies or nanobodies alone or in combination with another therapeutic, like a nucleotide analogue, to mimic the viral entry process and deceive the virus, or to develop mosaic vaccines. I argue that available data showing the effectiveness of ferritin‐antibody conjugates in targeting specific cells and ferritin‐haemagglutinin nanocages in developing influenza vaccines strongly support my proposals.