Bispecific neutralizing antibody targeting COVID-19 "coldspots"

A bispecific antibody targeting "coldspot" regions of the spike protein with infrequent amino acid changes could help treat variants of COVID-19 that escape other antibody therapies.

Bioinformatics analysis of more than 10 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences identified 15 coldspot regions in the viral genome — defined as those with >17 consecutive amino acids with a substitution frequency <0.1% — including regions encoding the SARS-CoV-2 S fusion peptide subunit, and the stem helix that precedes its heptad repeat 2 (HR2) subunit, which were both devoid of amino acid changes found in variants of concern...