Riding In Cars With Researchers

I'm Dr. Jeff Kingsley and welcome to another edition of Riding in Cars with Researchers. Do you want to know how we're coming up with therapies and vaccines for treating COVID-19 with therapies?We are literally looking at patients who actually survived COVID-19. And their body made the right antibodies and got rid of it. They defeated it and beat the virus. So what scientists are doing is they're taking blood samples from patients who succeeded in defeating COVID-19, and they're looking at all of the antibodies. Anytime your body sees something that is “not you” (a bacteria is not you; a virus is not you). Your body is continuously looking for threats; things that are not you. When your body sees something that it says, “Hey, this shouldn't be here; this is not me”, your body then randomly starts making antibodies to it. Most of the antibodies you make are worthless. Your body makes an antibody to a protein on a cell surface that does nothing. That antibody successfully grabs a protei