Hi, listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast. The Friday show,

we talk about a couple of stories we've read about in the Nature briefing, which is, of course,

Nature's Daily Roundup of the latest science news. A couple of stories to talk about today,

and joining me is Marin Huntsberger. Maron, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you again for having me. Not at all. Well, listen, why don't you go first this week? What have you got? I've got a really fun one this week, Ben. Okay, so as any parents out there listening will have experienced, do you get all kinds of germy nastiness from your kids when they bring it home from nursery and school. But you might have also experienced that

as they get older, maybe you get less and less sick because you're acquiring immunity. Now, who might

have more immunity than parents, Ben? It might be someone who spends all of their time with sick

children as their job. Right. Okay. So I'm guessing then this must be someone maybe in the medical

sphere. Exactly. Hit the nail right on the head. This study looked at pediatricians, whose, you know,

entire job is to spend time with sick children. And they looked at these pediatricians because

they're getting basically year-round exposure to respiratory viruses acquired from small children.

And they thought to themselves, hey, I bet these guys have built up

pretty strong immune protection to some of these viruses. And the two that we're talking about

in this paper, which I read in science translational medicine, are RSV and HMPV. That's respiratory

synstitial virus and human metanumovirus. And these are both what we call ubiquitous viruses, which means that

basically every child in the population, like nearly 100%, has gotten RSV by age 2 and HMPV by

H5. So they're everywhere. And these diseases are both often relatively mild, but they can

be severe, with RSV alone being responsible for 3.6 million hospitalizations and 100,000 deaths per year in children under five, according to the WHO.

So really serious. And the problem is we don't have vaccines that work for or are approved for RSV in young children. Now, you can get vaccinated as a mother who is pregnant and then you can pass those antibodies on to your child in utero, but we're looking for things that will help for the children who are affected by these diseases who are under two and under five. So what do you do in that case? If a vaccine isn't going to work, you skip a couple steps, and you just give them the antibodies. And I get a sense this is where the pediatricians are going to come in. Precisely. Now, we do have some antibody treatments that already exist for RSV. We don't have any that exist for HMPV, but they could be better. And this study aimed to do just that. So they took blood from pediatricians and screened their blood for B cells. And then they were able to take those B cells and extract

antibodies to RSV and HMPB. And then they were able to test these in a lab in mice and rats that

they exposed to these diseases. And these antibodies work really well, about 25 times better at

blocking RSV than our existing antibody treatments that we have available. And they were able to neutralize a wider range of strains of RSV. Which sounds like great news, and so this would be described as what a cocktail of antibodies. Exactly. This is what I'm going to call it at my next dinner party when I have doctors over. I'm going to make something that looks kind of yellow and call it an antibody cocktail. And one of my favorite parts about this is the, even just the title of the paper,

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