HEALTH

Israeli Scientists May Have Found the Cure for Coronavirus

Two treatments that can bring us closer to defeat the pandemic.

What would you say if I told you that the cure for Covid-19 has been found? Well, better start thinking because it seems that Israel came up with two drugs that can possibly beat the disease effectively.

In Tel Aviv, Professor Nadir Arber developed a substance called EXO-CD24, which passed the first phase of its clinical trial a week ago with promising results.

According to Telegraph, the treatment was given to thirty patients who contracted the virus and suffered from moderate and severe symptoms. Twenty-nine of them have recovered and been released from the hospital within five days, while one patient took a little longer to heal.

Initially, the medicine was designed to treat people with ovarian cancer and had to be taken by inhalation once a day for five days. The effect of the drug is explained as follows:

“A protein known as CD24 is delivered to the lungs by exosomes in the drug, which helps to rebalance the immune system and prevent it from overreacting to the virus.”

Although the early result of the treatment is positive and encouraging, there’s still a long way to go to get the drug licensed and fully tested. Professor Arber also added:

“Even if the vaccines do their job, and even if there aren’t any new mutations, one way or another, the coronavirus will be staying with us. That’s why we developed this special medication. It’s been about half a year from the time the idea was hatched to the first human trials [being] conducted.”

The next phase of the clinical trials will continue to examine the efficiency and the possible side effects of the treatment.

The other drug that brought positive results in clinical trials against Covid-19 is called Allocetra. It’s an immunotherapy drug developed by Dr. Dror Mevorach at Enlivex Therapeutics. It “treats the extreme overreaction of the body’s immune system seen in some severe coronavirus patients, which can sometimes lead to organ failure and death.”

According to Telegraph, Allocetra can substantially alleviate Covid symptoms in as little as two hours. The drug has completed its phase one and two clinical trials, in which twenty severely ill coronavirus patients were involved. Nineteen of them were eventually cured and discharged from the hospital after five days, and they are currently healthy.

One of the recovered patients, Yair Tayeb, has been interviewed by the Times of Israel:

“I couldn’t breathe, I could barely speak. [I was in] a very, very serious condition. They gave me the drug. Suddenly, after two hours, I started feeling something strange in my body. I stopped coughing, my breathing started to come back, I was feeling better. I stopped sweating. I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid to tell people I was okay. I was so excited.”

As of now, the drug is commencing its third trial phase.

According to Science Media Centre, Professor Stephen Evans from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said, “This is possibly a promising drug for treatment of very severely ill patients with Covid-19.”

He also added that even though the results look promising, they need to be treated with great caution. They don’t come from a randomized and controlled but rather an observational study.

These experimental drugs are a big step in the battle against the pandemic. If they are proved to be effective and safe, they can bring us closer to defeat the virus and begin a collective recovery. I’m hopeful that they will.