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It's early days yet but I've just been reading a report about an encouraging - maybe even exciting - new development in treatment for Covid19 that is in the offing.
Note firstly that most of the world's efforts so far have been on public hygiene (preventing the spread) and vaccination (preventing serious illness when infected) while the actual treatment of sick patients has involved a lot of trial and error under duress as wards overflow, medical supplies dwindle and medical staff are overworked and eventually overwhelmed, often becoming ill and even dying themselves. It hasn't reached those dire levels in Australia yet but anyone who has even remotely followed the course of the pandemic over the last 15 months would recognise those scenarios from New York, Italy, Brazil and many other countries, culminating in some terrible stories coming out of India in recent weeks.
The new treatment is based on an Australian discovery back in the 1990s called "gene silencing". The idea is that an injection of nano-particles targets and destroys the Covid19 virus while leaving other healthy host cells unharmed. This gives an otherwise terminal ICU patient the chance to recover through the body's natural healing mechanisms, rather than be overwhelmed by the virus. It's not described as a "cure" but if human trials prove successful it could greatly reduce death rates. It's also something that can be mass-produced and easily transported and stored so it should work equally well in third world settings.
Having said all that I repeat it's early days. They have only tested it on mice so far where it has destroyed 99.9% of virus. If it proceeds as planned they think it should be available for human use (once approved) by early 2023.
The greater significance of the technology is that it can be readily adapted for other viruses such as flu or whatever the next big pandemic is going to be - maybe another SARS-like virus. Hopefully the world will be much better prepared next time around.
The current development work is a joint undertaking by a Griffith University (Menzies Institute) team under Professor Nigel McMillan and a US-based team. Something for Australia to be proud of and a reminder that we need to maintain high levels of funding for Australian reserach, even if some of it is pure research rather than "applied" research (ie targeted at a narrow commercial need). The original discovery came about during research on plants. Who'd have guessed it could meet an urgent global health and humanitarian need 25 years later ... and might even earn Australia a few billion dollars if it comes to fruition?
www.abc.net.au
Note firstly that most of the world's efforts so far have been on public hygiene (preventing the spread) and vaccination (preventing serious illness when infected) while the actual treatment of sick patients has involved a lot of trial and error under duress as wards overflow, medical supplies dwindle and medical staff are overworked and eventually overwhelmed, often becoming ill and even dying themselves. It hasn't reached those dire levels in Australia yet but anyone who has even remotely followed the course of the pandemic over the last 15 months would recognise those scenarios from New York, Italy, Brazil and many other countries, culminating in some terrible stories coming out of India in recent weeks.
The new treatment is based on an Australian discovery back in the 1990s called "gene silencing". The idea is that an injection of nano-particles targets and destroys the Covid19 virus while leaving other healthy host cells unharmed. This gives an otherwise terminal ICU patient the chance to recover through the body's natural healing mechanisms, rather than be overwhelmed by the virus. It's not described as a "cure" but if human trials prove successful it could greatly reduce death rates. It's also something that can be mass-produced and easily transported and stored so it should work equally well in third world settings.
Having said all that I repeat it's early days. They have only tested it on mice so far where it has destroyed 99.9% of virus. If it proceeds as planned they think it should be available for human use (once approved) by early 2023.
The greater significance of the technology is that it can be readily adapted for other viruses such as flu or whatever the next big pandemic is going to be - maybe another SARS-like virus. Hopefully the world will be much better prepared next time around.
The current development work is a joint undertaking by a Griffith University (Menzies Institute) team under Professor Nigel McMillan and a US-based team. Something for Australia to be proud of and a reminder that we need to maintain high levels of funding for Australian reserach, even if some of it is pure research rather than "applied" research (ie targeted at a narrow commercial need). The original discovery came about during research on plants. Who'd have guessed it could meet an urgent global health and humanitarian need 25 years later ... and might even earn Australia a few billion dollars if it comes to fruition?
'We should be able to eliminate people dying from this': Researchers say they've made COVID breakthrough
Scientists have developed an antiviral therapy that kills off the COVID-19 viral load in infected mice by 99.9 per cent, Australian researchers say.
