Blue blood from horseshoe crabs can help in COVID-19 fight. Here’s how
What is older than a dinosaur, shaped like a helmet and used to clean many of the drugs that go into your body? A horseshoe crab.
These “living fossils” have unique blue blood with special compounds that can detect when vaccines or medical tools are contaminated with bacteria such as E. Coli and salmonella, including any that might be used to treat or prevent novel coronavirus infection.
But last week, any hope environmental groups and advocates had in substituting horseshoe crab blood with a synthetic alternative went down the drain, at least for now.
The United States Pharmacopoeia Convention (USP) announced last week that the proposed alternative known as rFC (recombinant factor C) needs much more study before replacing the blue blood.
“It is unfortunate that biomedical research still relies on the harvesting of a vulnerable wild animal population when there is a simple, effective, sustainable replacement that could exist in plentiful supply,” Ryan Phelan, a member of the Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition, said in a statement published Sunday in the Moultrie News.
The group claims the alternative has the potential to reduce demand for the crabs’ blood by 90%, saving about 100,000 crabs a year in North America alone.
In 2018, about 464,000 adult horseshoe crabs were harvested for their blood for the biomedical industry in the U.S., according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission
A needle is used to drain a third of their blood for a clotting agent used to make a liquid called Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL).
The product doesn’t kill bacteria, but envelopes it with a jelly coating, signaling to scientists that harmful endotoxins, which live on the walls of bacteria, are present, Business Insider reported in 2018.
If these toxins enter the bloodstream, they can cause fever, hypotension, nausea, toxic shock syndrome and even death, per ScienceDirect.com.
Most of the crabs are thrown back into the water where they were collected, but a portion of them die after the draining, however the exact numbers are unknown.
The USP says companies can use rFC only if “they prove that their method is validated and provides comparable results to the compendial procedure,” which “probably looks like a three to four-year delay with no guarantee,” Jay Bolden, a biologist with Eli Lily, an American pharmaceutical company, told the New York Times.
The company “drew the line in the sand” in 2016 when they switched over to rFC for injectable products they were developing because it avoids exploiting animal populations and it has a consistent quality, he told the outlet.
Eli Lily created a migraine medicine that was the first FDA approved drug to use rFC instead of LAL from crab blood, according to Contract Pharma.
Last week, the company said they began testing a COVID-19 antibody in humans with safety testing done by rFC alone; Bolden said more than 40,000 samples prove the alternative’s “compatibility with crab blood,” Reuters reported.
“And that data is out there, and it’s either not being looked at or it’s being ignored,” Bolden told the outlet. “There’s no reason the USP should be asking for more data.”
Another company called Lonza Group, a Swiss biotechnology company, made a deal with Moderna — the company already testing a potential coronavirus vaccine in people — to produce the vaccine in large quantities, the Times reported.
Lonza said five billion doses of vaccine would require “less than a day’s combined production for all three LAL manufacturers in the United States,” which all claim that the current supply of crabs is sufficient to handle vaccine demand, the Times reported.
Less than a third of horseshoe crabs remain today, according to the Recovery Coalition. The species is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
This story was originally published June 10, 2020 at 10:37 AM with the headline "Blue blood from horseshoe crabs can help in COVID-19 fight. Here’s how."
