An Israeli anti-Covid drug gives excellent results after the first test

If the studies confirm the very first results, the fight against Covid-19 it could be at a turning point. From Israel, where the vaccination campaign proceeds at an incessant pace (40% of the population has already received the first dose and 25% the second), another good news arrives. A drug which resulted in a marked improvement in 29 out of 30 patients who received it, all within 3-5 days. To experience it was the Sourasky Medical Center of Tel Aviv, also known as Ichilov Hospital.

The creator of the drug, Nadir Arber of the hospital’s Integrated Cancer Prevention Center, administered the product to patients in moderate or severe conditions, apparently reporting an efficacy threshold of 96%. But the champion involved is obviously very small. Too much for now. The product, baptized Exo-CD24, «Is administered for inhalation, once a day, in a procedure that takes only a few minutes. It must then be continued for five days, ”Arber explained. So the Israeli cocktail is administered locally and would have no side effects, it is quick to prepare and low cost. It will now move on to further phases of experimentation with the green light of the local Ministry of Health, necessary to expand the patients on which it will be tested.

But how does the product work? “It is based on that’s my that the body releases from the cell membrane and uses for intercellular communication. What we do is enrich the exosomes with the 24CD protein, which is known to play an important role in regulating the immune system, ”added the scientist.

Therefore, among the 30 patients who received the drug, 29 showed a marked improvement within 48 hours. So much so that they were released from the hospital a few days later. The thirtieth patient also recovered, albeit taking longer. Basically the medicine manages to counter the dangerous cytokine storm, the natural and life-threatening immune reaction to coronavirus infection. It does so precisely through exosomes, exoribonuclease complexes, that is, tiny sac-shaped particles involved in the degradation processes of mRna that transport materials between cells, to deliver a protein called CD24 to the lungs. “We enrich the exosomes with the 24CD protein, which is known to play an important role in regulating the immune system,” said the director of the Arber laboratory. Shiran Shapira, which has been researching the protein for decades.

Second Roni Gamzu, director of the Ichilov research center and former head of the government coronavirus team, the research “is advanced and sophisticated and could save coronavirus patients. The results of the phase 1 experimentation are excellent and give us confidence in the method that researchers have been studying in our laboratory for many years ». It obviously remains to be understood, as in the case of vaccines, whether it has the same efficacy on different strains of the virus. Even if intervening on the modulation of the innate immune response and therefore not with the aim of promoting the production of neutralizing antibodies, therefore acting on a completely different mechanism, it seems unlikely that the mutations could interfere. At the moment it does not appear that a scientific study on the experiment has been published.