Coronavirus Update: Cell Therapy Reportedly Appears Promising To Beat COVID-19

The scientists who developed Dolly the sheep in 1996 is, currently, developing a new therapy to treat the deadly coronavirus infection using immune cells from young and healthy volunteers.

Using Your Body’s Natural Defenses against the Virus

Such an immunity-building cell transfusion has already been used to treat cancer. The researchers believe that it will be effective against the COVID-19 as well.

“One of the key challenges of fighting viral infection is to develop something that is going to attack the infected cells and not the normal cells. So the solution that we came up with was to look at the body's natural defenses to viral infection. In patients who have successfully fought a viral infection, they have expanded their own immune system and that persists after that to stop them becoming infected again," the Mirror quoted Dr. Brian Kelly, the study’s senior strategic medical adviser.

According to the researchers, their treatment sees donor T-cells differ from normal immune cells as they do not identify invaders in the body based on an alien protrusion on the cells’ surfaces but detects the unusual metabolism of the viruses.

When the donor cells detect a virus, it starts to destroy alongside giving signals to the rest of the immune system that an alien intrusion has occurred and that it needs to be eradicated. Such an approach might be effective even when the virus is mutated or returned to a body.

Experimental Stem cell therapy by Celularity

Derived from human placentas, this new stem cell therapy will undergo early testing in COVID-19 patients. Although it hasn’t yet been used on any patient with the coronavirus symptoms, it has caught the attention of U.S. President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who had tweeted that it had real potential.

There is no proven treatment yet for COVID-19 and health experts worldwide have been carrying out several experimental approaches including the old malarial drug, anti-HIV drug, and the Japanese flu drug.

Celilarity has announced its early-stage trial for COVID-19 treatment known as Cynk-001 and has described the development as the ‘first FDA-approved COVID-19 cell therapy. It is important to note that the agency has only approved the treatment to be used in a clinical trial and not to be widely prescribed to patients.

“The objective here is preventative. If the timing of giving this can prevent those patients who have early disease from progressing to the more serious, life-threatening form, it could be a very, very useful tool,” The New York Times quoted Dr. Robert Hariri, Celularity’s founder and chief executive.