New Antiviral Therapy Shows Promising Results Against All Variants Of Covid-19

Australian and UK scientists have developed an antiviral therapy that shows promising results in the treatment of Covid-19. Here's everything you need to know.

Scientists from Australia and the US have developed an experimental direct-acting antiviral therapy that shows promising results against Covid-19. Ever since the onset of the pandemic, scientists all over the world are working tirelessly to find a way to mitigate the risk of coronavirus, if not eliminate it. In the process, they have produced several vaccines and run clinical trials on existing medication that could work against the microscopic villain. So far, Tamiflu, zanamivir and remdesivir are the few antiviral that could help reduce symptoms and help people recover from the disease.

New Antiviral Approach Effective Against New Covid Variants

The antiviral therapy delivers gene-silencing RNA technology called small-interfering RNA (siRNA) to the lungs that helps attack the virus' genome directly and stops it from replication as well as lipid nanoparticles. Co-lead researcher Nigel McMillan, Professor at Menzies Health Institute Queensland (MHIQ) at Griffith University said, "Treatment with virus-specific siRNA reduces viral load by 99.9 per cent. These stealth nanoparticles can be delivered to a wide range of lung cells and silence viral genes."

The therapy showed positive results when tested in SARS-CoV-2 infected mice. It improved survival and loss of disease in the mice infected with the SARS-CoV-2. Scientists didn't find any trace of the infection in the lungs of the treated survivors. Kevin Morris, Professor and associate director of the Center for Gene Therapy at City of Hope said, "This treatment is designed to work on all beta coronaviruses such as the original SARS virus (SARS-CoV-1) as well as SARS-CoV-2 and any new variants that may arise in the future because it targets ultra-conserved regions in the virus' genome."

In the study published in the journal Molecular Therapy, researchers said that this agency could be used in low-resource settings to treat patients infected with the coronavirus. Nanoparticles were found to be stable at room temperature for more than a month and at four degrees for twelve months. As per the study results, the siRNA-nanoparticle formations can be developed as a therapy that will help fight the infection by directly targeting the virus' genome.

(with inputs from IANS)