Californian biopharmaceutical company claims finding cure for SARS-CoV-2 (investors.sorrentotherapeutics.com)

Not exactly, but on the right line of thought. Antibody drugs are a common type of drug (think humira) thatbaremt that hard to manufacture (compared to something like a gene therapy). And their platform is an antibody design platform, so they've used it to design and screen antibodies to find one that will bind to and neutralize the covid virus. They're not the only ones either, there have been a few discovered so far. The next steps are to move them into clinical trials just producing these antibodies as the drug, no need for finding anything with a similar shape

> is expected to be able to produce up to two hundred thousand doses per month and the Company intends to produce a million doses at risk while seeking FDA approval

"Is expected" might be the caveat, but does sound promising from a scale perspective.

Maybe also defense production act to swap other production lines to produce either this antibody or one of the many other candidates also announced. Although obviously I think the people taking humira or an anticancer antibody or any of the other antibodues might have some thoughts on their drug not being available so a covid drug can be made available...

It depends on the in vitro experiment and the context. Something like "kills cancer cell" is nearly meaningless (hence the famous XKCD comic). Here, this is a well known mechanism of action (remember balto and the diphtheria antitoxin and the Iditarod? This is fancy antitoxin kind of). And the in vitro experiment is a test to show that it is a neutralizing antibody that binds to the virus and stops entry. The in vitro model is the exact same mechanism of entry the virus uses in the body. While there are still lots of unknowns and unknown unknowns, and of course sorrento will have to run through extensive (or perhaps less extensive under the circumstances) clinical testing before we know for sure it works, this is more promising than your usual popsci "strawberry shortcake kills cancer cells on vitro" experiment. We also have some human data from convalescent sera I believe, amd this is essentially just controlled, high quality convalescent sera that you dont need to extract from humans, so even more validation there, which is why so many people are excited about and pursuing and antibody approach (sorrento isn't the only one or the first to develop a neutralizing antibody to covid)

An Inhibitor is a cure, like convalescent plasma. You could maybe use these for passive immunity, but this is clearly pitched as a therapy, not a preventative, with the idea if stopping disease progression by stopping viral replication. And I dont think antibodies can be administered nasally, they're usually injected or intravenous

It's a treatment that stops viral replication within four days. It might not shut down cytokine storm, but if administered earlier, it stops replication which would be a cure if it works. Biotechs tend to avoid the word cure early on, you'll see the word treatment, because cure is a word that's hard to define and often meaningless or with blurry boundaries.

Aren't mAb therapies very expensive, though? My experience in oncology tells me that some mAb courses (bevacizumab, for example) have costs that go through the roof.

perfect time to issue more stock and dilute shareholders at a higher valuation... before the dump