New inhalable COVID treatment in Israel shows ‘dramatic results’

There is good news on the COVID front that involves a cure for people who have already contracted the disease in Israel, and doctors have reported some pretty dramatic results. Mercer Island MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined the Seattle 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 received a treatment developed in Tel Aviv as part of a phase 1 trial… intended to treat an component of the disease we talked about, which is the cytokine storm. It’s the body’s reaction to the virus, and it’s this overwhelming immunological response that causes the lungs to flood and all organ systems to become inflamed that often leads to death, ”he said.

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“So in this case, they deliver an inhaled protein – the CD 24 protein to the lungs – and they found that it greatly alleviated the cytokine storm that was going on, and in fact, they cured roughly 30 out of 30 patients and 29 out of 30 of them in just a few days. So that was a pretty dramatic response.

Not only is the treatment inhalable, it initially appears to have fewer side effects than other COVID treatments.

“It’s inhaled once a day for a few minutes at a time, and they do it for five days, and it directly targets the lungs, which is really the site of the cytokine storm. It is really different from other treatments – which we give to the whole body, which we give systemically – and has a lot of side effects. It doesn’t really have a lot of side effects associated with it, ”Dr. Cohen said.

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