IS TREATMENT for the coronavirus not too far away?
An article in USA Today said yes, quoting a doctor in the Department of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. “I’m very hopeful and very positive,” Dr. Robert Kruse said. “We’ll get through this.”
Relief from the deadly virus could come from three treatment strategies being pursued by researchers, according to the article. One, which is considered the quickest option, is the use of antibodies harvested from recovered patients.
“The use of survivor antibodies, serum therapy, dates back to 1891 when it was used successfully to treat a child with diptheria. Since then, serum from recovered patients has been used ‘to stem outbreaks of viral diseases such as poliomylitis, measles, mumps and influenza,’ according to a paper Friday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.”
The serum therapy has its drawbacks, the article said, as the transfusion of serum carries potential side effects, including fever, allergic reactions, “and a very small risk of infectious disease transmission.”
The second strategy involves the use of a decoy to divert the coronavirus from reaching the cell receptors, known to medical doctors as the ACE-2 protein. Kruse proposed to detach the external portion of the ACE-2 to mislead the virus.
The third option is the so-called “repurposing” of a drug, which happens “when a drug that has been found safe and approved for treatment of one disease also is found useful in treating another. One example is the drug Sildenafil, which is sold as Viagra and used to treat both erectile dysfunction and pulmonary hypertension.”
The article said that no vaccine is expected anytime soon so “treatments are crucial to saving the lives of thousands of the infected, especially high-risk patients—the elderly, those with compromised immune systems and those with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease and lung disease.”
The dim view on the availability of a coronavirus vaccine cannot be ascribed to lack of trying. The US government has spoken with more than 25 companies in search of a vaccine and is willing to speak with more, an American official told the New York Times.
One of them is a German company, CureVac, which is headed by an American by the name of Daniel Menichella. On the day of his meeting with US officials led by President Trump at the White House on March 2, Menichella declared confidence that his company “will be able to develop a potent vaccine candidate within a few months.”
Ten days after that meeting, however, CureVac announced that Menichella was leaving the company apparently in reaction to the supposed offer of a “large sum” of money to convince CureVac to move its research to the United States.
Hopefully, this incident will not set back the development of a coronavirus vaccine. If it does and as Dr. Kruse predicted, a vaccine is still a long way off, we can only place our hopes in the treatment in the meantime.
So to my fellow elderly and high-risk friends, don’t get sick with Covid-19 or if you do, don’t die yet. Help could be on the way.