Zhi Hong joined Tsinghua University and Third People’s Hospital of Shenzhen on March 31 to announce a partnership and license agreement to discover, develop, manufacture and commercialize fully human neutralizing monoclonal antibodies against COVID-19. The collaboration aims to achieve an accelerated six-month timeline from the selection of a lead development candidate to first-in-human clinical trials, with potential for additional timeline acceleration, the partners said. The partners also cited research by Linqi Zhang at Tsinghua University and Professor Zheng Zhang at Third People’s Hospital of Shenzhen, in a preprint published March 26 in bioRxiv. The researchers characterized antibody responses in eight COVID-19 patients and isolated 206 monoclonal antibodies specific to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain. Of the antibodies with potential therapeutic potential against SARS-CoV-2, the most potent were P2C-1F11 and P2B-2F6.