Employees at UW Medicine’s drive-through testing facility. (AP Photo / Ted S. Warren)
There is good news in the field of COVID, which has a cure for people who have already contracted the disease in Israel, and doctors there have reported some pretty dramatic results. Dr. Gordon Cohen, MD of Mercer Island, joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss what it entails.
“The good news from Israel is that they had 30 patients with moderate to severe COVID-19, and they were receiving a treatment developed in Tel Aviv as part of a phase 1 trial … intended to be part of to treat the disease that we have been talking about is the cytokine storm. This is the body’s response to the virus, and it is this overwhelming immune response that causes the lungs to overflow and the inflammation of all the organ systems that often lead to the death, ”he said.
Mercer Island MD: How a New Single Dose Vaccine Could Help Us Maintain Immunity
“So in this case, they deliver an inhaled protein – the CD24 protein to the lungs – and they found that it really drastically attenuated the cytokine storm that was going on, and in fact, they actually cured 30 of the 30 patients and 29 of the 30 of them in a few days, so it was a pretty dramatic response. ”
In addition to being inhalable, the treatment appears to have fewer side effects than other COVID treatments at first glance.
“It’s inhaled once a day for a few minutes at a time, and they do it for five days, and it targets the lungs directly, which is actually the site of the cytokine storm. It’s really different from other treatments – we give it to the whole body, we give it systemically – and has a lot of side effects. This doesn’t really have many side effects associated with it, ”said Dr. Cohen.
Former WA AG McKenna: Biden ‘within his rights’ on orders of mask, vaccine
Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 pm on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to it podcast here.