If there is one thing on which the world scientific community agrees, it is to get out of this damn pandemic vaccines alone are not enough. Medicines are also needed to treat the sick, including those suffering from Long Covid, and able to maintain their effectiveness even against new variants of the virus Sars-Cov-2. An urgent need, this, which has led a powerful international collaboration, with strong Italian participation, to identify a new way to hit the virus and a drug that we could potentially use in a short time.
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“Instead of blocking the virus from entering cells, we tried to figure out how to block its exit,” he explains Giuseppe Novelli, geneticist at the Tor Vergata University of Rome, first author of the study. “We have thus identified a class of enzymes, called E3-ubiquitin league, which are necessary for the virus to leave the cells and spread to other tissues in the body, ”he adds. The action of these proteins, described in a study published in the journal Cell Death & Disease, it is also similar in other viruses, such as that ofEbola. “And no less important is that these proteins are not of the virus, but ours and, therefore, would not be affected by the variations of the virus”, he specifies Novelli. Researchers have shown that the levels of these enzymes are elevated in patients’ lungs and other tissues infected with the virus.
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Once this new path was discovered, the researchers also identified a possible new drug. “It’s theIndolo-3 Carbinolo (I3C), already used in the treatment of rare diseases, and which we have shown, for the moment in vitro, to be able to block the exit of the virus “, says Novelli. “If we prevent or even slow down the replication of the virus, we can also compromise its survival,” he adds. These are promising results, so much so that one begins to think about a study on patients. “We have to test the drug in clinical trials with patients Covid-19 to rigorously assess whether it can prevent the manifestation of severe and potentially fatal symptoms ”, he stresses Novelli. “Having options for treatment, particularly for patients who cannot be vaccinated, is critically important to save more and more lives and contribute to better public health status and management,” he adds.
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The pandemic, it is now clear, is an enemy that must be fought with more weapons. “We have to think long term,” he says Pier Paolo Pandolfi, scientist of the University of Turin and Nevada who, together with Novelli, coordinated the study. “Vaccines, while being very effective, may no longer be so in the future, because the virus mutates, and therefore it is necessary to have more weapons to fight it. The discovery on I3C – he continues – is important, and now we must start clinical trials to demonstrate its potential effectiveness. It will be important to assess whether I3C can also reduce the very serious clinical complications that many patients experience after passing the acute phase of the infection. This will represent a serious problem in the years to come, which we will have to manage ”.
Longform
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The study, supported by Rome Foundation, was conducted in collaboration with theBambino Gesù Hospital in Rome, the Spallanzani Institute, the San Raffaele University in Rome and several American (Harvard, Yale, Rockefeller, NIH, Mount Sinai, Boston University), Canadian (University of Toronto) and French (INSERM Paris and Hôpital Avicenne) institutions.
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