In a YouTube interview, Distributed Bio CEO Jacob Glanville explains the company’s strategy to combat COVID‑19 with a directly administered antibody therapeutic rather than a traditional vaccine. He describes how his team repurposes and engineers decades‑old anti‑SARS antibodies to target SARS‑CoV‑2, enabling a rapid development timeline: engineering completion by the week of April 13, pre‑clinical testing at USAMRIID, a potential summer human safety study, and compassionate‑use distribution by September. Glanville outlines the regulatory and manufacturing hurdles, the plan to make the product available globally (including Latin America) through compassionate‑use protocols, and a pricing model that aims to sell the treatment at cost (estimated $500‑$1,000 per dose versus typical $8,000 antibody drugs). He also discusses administration options—preferring a simple injection over an IV infusion to speed delivery and reduce exposure risk. Throughout, he emphasizes speed, affordability, and broad access as essential to curbing the pandemic.
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Well, we're with Jacob Glanville, the DistributedBio CEO. Jacob, thank you so much for this time. I know it's real busy these days. And actually, you can recognize him too from the documentary Pandemic that most of us have seen by now. Jacob, I know 20 labs and more are working on vaccine or a cure for COVID-19. What is your approach?
Sure. So first off, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I'm glad to take these moments just to get some of the information out. I think if people are informed, then they're more prepared and they're more likely to be confident and not scared. So my laboratory is one of the many groups that are working on a medicine. What we're doing is making an antibody therapeutic. You can think of that like a vaccine, except that with a vaccine you inject little pieces of the virus and then the person's body responds to that over 6 or 7 weeks to make antibodies, and then that person could be protected. What I'm making is I'm skipping that whole process and I'm just creating the antibody directly. So we inject that into the person so that person is protected within minutes of receiving the injection.
Will that reverse the damage that could be happening in the lungs, for example?
Yeah, so the, like a vaccine, for instance, you can't give to a patient because if vaccine takes 7 weeks to work, by the time you give them a vaccine, by the time the vaccine would do any good, they either are already recovered or they have died. Whereas with an antibody, you give it to a patient, within 20 minutes it's in their body and it can protect and neutralize the virus. So it's a treatment you could give to patients to cure them. It's also a treatment you could give to doctors and nurses and you inject them with the antibody and the antibodies last a long time for like 8 weeks, 2 months, they'll be in your body and they'll protect you so you don't get sick.
Sounds like magic, but how long until this could be ready for the population?
So the reason that I chose an antibody was I knew we were rushing to find a cure. And we need a cure both to protect our families, our health, but also our way of life and our global economy. It's very important that we have a new medicine because it's so infectious. Vaccines are important, but I thought they were going to take too long to be helpful for the world right now because we're estimating 18 months. So the end of 2021, maybe even 2022 before a vaccine would be ready. An antibody you can produce much faster. So what I did in January is I started engineering old anti-SARS antibodies. So these are antibodies that recognize the SARS virus from almost 20 years ago. These are great drugs. If you ever needed to treat SARS, these things would be the medicine. And I used a technology in my laboratory where we can tweak or engineer those antibodies to race to catch up to the new coronavirus because SARS and the new coronavirus are like old cousins. And we can evolve those antibodies. And the advantage of this is that my laboratory was able to do this very quickly, to adapt an already good medicine against SARS to become an excellent medicine against COVID-19. So we are, we are done with our engineering in the next few weeks. So the week of April 13th, we're done. We're sending our antibodies to the military in the United States, USAMRIID. They're going to test it to see how potently it neutralizes the virus, both COVID-19-causing CoV-2, As well as the SARS virus. At that point, we start doing safety and scale-up, and we could— assuming we can process red tape and assuming the manufacturing goes smoothly, we could run a human study in the summer that would give us enough information to tell us if the drug is working. Then, if the drug is working, we could begin releasing it to the larger human population through something called compassionate use, which says that if you have— if this— if there's evidence that this is working well and it's safe, There's no other good medicine, you can start releasing it to hundreds of thousands of people even before you complete the additional normal medical trials. So this, by my estimation, is the fastest way we can get a medicine as soon as possible to treat the population, because right now there is no medicine for COVID-19.
Yeah. So in that case, in order for it to get to Latin America, how long do you think it will take? Would that be the same time? So by September we could have it?
Yeah, our objective is to have it for all human populations by September. There's a couple things need to go right. There's technical things on the science side, but there's also just a lot of paperwork. It's red tape that we're trying to go as quickly as possible. But yes, our objective is to make everybody have access to it as quickly as possible. The nice thing about compassionate use protocols is that you can— individual nations can just choose to accept the compassionate use protocol, which means there aren't the same types of limitations on distributing medicine globally. It just becomes the question of how can you produce enough to reach everybody who needs it.
Sure. And then actually related to that, what would be the cost of it? Would it be affordable to just anybody or any government?
So what, what the world should do right now is that governments should pay for this and we should release it at cost. So that is the cost to the global economy is such that governments should chip in together and they should just pay for massive vats of the material. Now this is assuming, look, in the summer this needs to protect patients. Right, assuming that it works in patients and that they get better, then government should pay for very large production of this, and we should be able to distribute it at cost to all the citizens of the world who need it.
Then when you mention at cost, would that be like what? Could you give us a window?
Yeah, so at cost means you have your governments pay for it. So either the governments pay for everything, or they decide that the People at the bench receive a certain amount. Now normally antibody drugs are expensive. They're like $8,000 for a treatment. But that is assuming that a 100,000-person company is gonna receive a large profit. The actual production costs are much less. They could be like $1,000 or $500, somewhere in that arena. I don't know that exact number yet, but that's a much more reasonable treatment to be able to cure the disease. And that's, that's about the range you wanna reach. I would like to have some extra money coming to my company, but I have a 30-person company. So I do not need to make billions of dollars on this. Mm-hmm. My objective is to be able to make a working medicine and be able to release it very quickly, which means we can, we should produce it cheaply so that the whole world could get treated. And the argument I would make why we should produce it cheaply is that if we don't, not enough people receive the treatment. We want to have as many people receive the treatment as possible because then that slows the spread of the outbreak.
Then how would you administrate this medicine? Would it be an inhaler? Would it need to be injected to somebody?
COVID is going to be an injection. It's going to be, it may be an infusion like an IV. Or it may be an injection, and we're still—that's what we're trying to figure out over the next three weeks—is it comes down to an antibody. You try to figure out how how you how thermostable or how strong you can make it. If an antibody is medium strong, you can concentrate it until it maybe fits in like half a liter, and that fits in a wave bag. But if but if it's very strong antibody, you can concentrate it down until it's like a thick syrup, and then it's just an injection. And it's always better to have like a needle rather than an infusion, because otherwise for an infusion, you have to go to a hospital and sit down and wait for half an hour while it goes into your blood. Where if an injection, the doctor can just go up and be like, bop, okay, you're next, leave. And that's safer for the patient because they're less likely to be exposed to COVID in a hospital. It's more convenient and you could treat many more people because you don't need to have a seat for each person to wait for half an hour for the drug to enter. We're trying to determine whether we can use the injection or we have to use the wave bag. And we're gonna find that answer in the next 3 weeks.
When will be your next landmark? I understand pretty soon, right?
Yeah, so the next landmark, we're telling everyone it's April 13th. Could be earlier, but we'll say April 13th. And at that point, when we have the good news, you'll hear about it, as will others. And then that basically has told us that yes, we have a molecule, it's super high affinity, it's super thermostable, it hits the neutralizing epitope. Then we send that material over to the military. And then they're going to go test it because they have facilities where they have the COV-2 virus. They also have the SARS virus, which is quite dangerous. And they can test because our antibodies should be able to neutralize SARS and also COV-2 and potentially a whole bunch of other coronaviruses in between. So they will do that test. That's our next exciting point. At that point, that's a drug. At that point, it's really the next exciting thing will be we are shaking the tree of the U.S. government to try to help pay for what— for this study that we think should run in this— in this— in the summer. And so we're contacting DARPA, BARDA, we're coordinating with these governmental groups to convince them that they should run that study in the summer so that we can start treating large populations of patients by September.
