A scientist's Odyssey to search for a COVID-19 cure

China-US scientific collaboration will bring enormous benefits for the world, including bolstering progress in finding a cure for the novel coronavirus, said Sunney Xie, director of the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics at Peking University.

"Sino-US collaboration is mutually beneficial, contrary to what Americans are led to believe that China is the sole beneficiary," he said at the latest Vision China event on Sunday.

Xie said his latest goal is to find the neutralizing antibodies from COVID-19 survivors and inject them into patients as a substitute for plasma therapy, which has shown efficacy against the disease but is also difficult to scale up due to limited supply.

"We now have completed the testing on the animal model. I am happy to report that when our neutralizing antibody was injected into infected mice, the virus load was reduced by more than 2400 times, and when injected into uninfected mice, they were free from the viral infection! This work has just been published online in Cell magazine."

"Being scientists, we all believe that it is science, not politics, that will save mankind from the disaster of COVID-19 and other disasters yet to come," he said. "Diseases have no borders, neither does research, nor should humanity."