Vir Biotechnology assembled its pipeline of infectious disease compounds through deal-making with other drug developers, along with financial support from ... is a Vir co-founder. Our innovations stem from courage and bold ideas. Vir Biotechnology, Inc. operates as a clinical-stage immunology company that focuses on combining immunologic insights with cutting-edge technologies to … “We put together several different cocktails and we’ve put them in our queue for large-scale manufacturing.”Vir and Regeneron have similar development timetables.Rather than looking for antibodies against epitopes that are conserved between SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2, Regeneron is restricting its search to the latter.SARS-CoV-2 S - SARS-CoV-2 spike proteinScangos said Vir believes the best approach is to find epitopes that have “been conserved over many years of divergent evolution, when most parts of the virus have changed.” These are “likely to be very important for the virus in some functional sense” and therefore are unlikely to change when the virus mutates, he said.Vir is developing contingency plans for running trials in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa if the outbreak isn’t active in North America in the summer, Scangos said.The two companies also differ on the merits of a cocktail approach.Regeneron and Vir, two of the companies at the forefront of the race to develop antibody-based therapies for COVID-19, have very different ideas about the best ways to discover and develop mAbs that could protect against or treat the disease.Vir is prioritizing a single antibody against an epitope that is conserved between the coronaviruses that cause COVID-19 and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), while Regeneron is focused on cocktails of antibodies that are specific to COVID-19.Regeneron plans to start human trials in June, while Vir has stated that it expects to have its candidates in broad clinical trials this summer.“Because they are so specific,” antibodies targeting the novel coronavirus’ receptor binding domain are “orders of magnitude more potent than these cross-reacting type antibodies you can get from SARS-CoV-1 patients,” Yancopoulos said.Scangos added that Vir has “a whole other series of antibodies from SARS-CoV-2 patients that bind to different sites” that are “highly potent.”Yet the company has also developed additional antibodies that could be combined into a cocktail. Nelson has backed some of biotech’s most ambitious companies, including Juno Therapeutics, GRAIL and Sana Biotechnology. Using their antibody platform Vir identifies rare antibodies from survivors of infectious diseases, which are unusually successful immune responses that naturally occur in some people who are protected from or have recovered from an infectious disease. “If a single antibody can provide an effective therapy from which the virus can’t escape, it has a lot of advantages in terms of cost of goods [and] in terms of the number of patients who can be treated with a given manufacturing capacity,” Scangos said.George Scangos, Vir BiotechnologySign in to your BioCentury account to access your content.Get a two-week free trial subscription to BioCentury