Workers at UW Medicine’s drive-through testing facilities. (Photo by AP / Ted S. Warren)
There is good news on the COVID front involving care for people who have already suffered from the disease in Israel, and doctors there have reported quite dramatic results. Dr. Gordon Cohen, MD of Mercer Island, joined Seattle Morning News to discuss what it entails.
“The good news outside of Israel is that they had 30 patients who had moderate to severe COVID-19, and they were given a treatment developed in Tel Aviv as part of a first-phase trial … aimed at treating a component of the disease we talked about, which is the cytokine storm.This is the body’s reaction to the virus, and it is this overwhelming immune response that causes flooding of the lungs and inflammation of all the organ systems that often leads to death, ”he said.
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“So in this case they deliver an inhaled protein, CD 24 protein to the lungs, and they found that it really dramatically attenuates the cytokine storm that occurs and in fact they cured basically 30 out of 30 patients and 29 out of every “30 of them in just a couple of days. So it was a pretty dramatic response.”
The treatment is not only inhalable, but appears to have fewer side effects at first than other COVID treatments.
“It is inhaled once a day for a few minutes at a time, and they do it for five days, and it goes directly to the lungs, which is really the site of the cytokine storm. It really differs from other treatments (which we’re giving it to the whole body, which we’re giving systemically) and it has a lot of side effects. Actually, that doesn’t have a lot of associated side effects, ”Dr. Cohen said.
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