99.9% extermination of COVID in lungs is a pretty good outcome. That’s the latest result from tests by Menzies Health Institute Queensland and the US research institute City of Hope. It’s a whole new approach, and it has ramifications for all types of viral disease, in theory.
The pandemic has opened the floodgates for research, which is now overtaking the horror stories. The news is now full of new developments, and this one is something truly new.
The new genetic vaccine is a “gene silencer”, which also prevents it replicating. If that sounds huge, it is. Viral replication is its best, surest, survival mechanism, and how it adapts.
The new method uses nanoparticles intravenously to shut down the virus in the lungs. This treatment is being called “not a cure”, but it answers just about all the issues COVID causes.
COVID does sometimes go beyond the lungs. “Long COVID” is a more developed form of the disease, sometimes spreading to a truly exceptional range of other tissues. That’s one of the things that makes it so deadly, and long COVID so hard to treat.
However – Shutting down the main pathway to tissue infection, and perhaps specialised treatments targeting other areas looks pretty strong as the basis of treatment. These are early days for this whole class of treatment.
Ramifications – What else can it do?
The next logical question is whether it can manage viruses in other fields. Viruses affect just about everything on Earth, from people to agriculture, and very expensively. Genome shutdown looks like a good systemic approach, able to target all the major issues of viral infections.
Coronaviruses are famous for being tough targets. They’re tricky, highly evasive of immune systems, and global. If this treatment works on them, it might just be the key to managing viral infections of all kinds.
The treatment might also help manage one of the world’s more baffling issues. Genetic damage by viruses is considered by many scientists to be the basis of some of the world’s worst diseases. If so, a systemic preventative genetic targeting approach might do what centuries of treatments and surgery haven’t been able to do.
If there’s such a thing as a general viral suppression vaccine, it could do something never before done – Keep people in good working order from birth. Imagine the miseries people would never have to experience.
Yes, this is thinking a long way ahead and there’s a lot of hard work to be done. But – When you ask that question, can you resist finding the answer?
