From The Medical Republic, 10 March 2022:
Covid can develop resistance to the monoclonal antibody that was thought to be “variant-proof”, Australian research suggests.
A research letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports on four patients with covid who experienced treatment failure with sotrovimab, and were then found to have variants of SARS-CoV-2 that carried resistance mutations to the drug.
The Australian study enrolled 100 patients who were treated with sotrovimab during the Delta outbreak between August and November last year. Eight of these patients were persistently positive for SARS-CoV-2 despite treatment.
When researchers analysed respiratory specimens taken before and after treatment, they found that four of these patients were carrying SARS-CoV-2 strains with mutations in the receptor-binding domain of the virus’s spike protein that enabled the virus to avoid being neutralised by the monoclonal antibody. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 