Treating COVID-19: Bipolar drug shows promise and other hopeful findings

This allows us to establish a person’s immune status.” – James Hindley, Ph.D.The researcher went on to explain that the test will be useful “for vaccine development; to determine whether a T-cell response to the vaccine has been generated and whether that is adequate to be protective from infection.”“We also believe this test will enable public health bodies to perform much wider screenings of the population. “Where we were innovative was looking at the minimum requirements to perform this test, to get the necessary data to answer the question of whether a person has specific T-cell responses.”“By providing just these elements without the added complexity, we made this test much easier to perform in almost any lab.”New research spearheaded by Marcus Buggert, an immunologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, also has T cells at its heart.Buggert and his team found that 30 out of 31 people who recovered from a mild SARS-CoV-2 infection had memory T-cell responses to the new virus. Such findings add to the newly emerging direction in research that uses T cells as an alternative path to COVID-19 immunity.In the new study, T cell responses were still visible months after a mild infection, sometimes even in the absence of antibodies.“In the absence of a protective vaccine,” says Buggert, “it is critical to determine if exposed or infected people, especially those with asymptomatic or very mild forms of the disease who likely act inadvertently as the major transmitters, develop robust adaptive immune responses against SARS-CoV-2.”“Our findings suggest that the reliance on antibody responses may underestimate the extent of population-level immunity against SARS-CoV-2. The obvious next step is to determine whether robust memory T-cell responses in the absence of detectable antibodies can protect against COVID-19 in the long term.” – Marcus BuggertFinally, an observational study found a class of drugs called interleukin-6 (IL-6) receptor inhibitors to be the most effective for treating severe forms of COVID-19.