Strategies for Treatment

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Part 6: What is the Hope for a Cure, What Can We Do to Prevent Infections in the First Place

The question is always asked what is the hope for a cure today and also what can we do to prevent infection in the first place well as we talked about what we can do to prevent infection in the first place is this issue of self-containment washing your hands the power soap and frankly, the most important one of the most important things is the elbow bump stop doing handshaking.

The issue of the cure is a complex issue because we have to talk about what is the difference between a treatment for those of their ill versus what is a vaccine that will prevent the infection from happening and I'll try and address that I'll try and explain the difference between a treatment and a vaccine but I think we also would like to discuss what new treatments are being developed today and I'm excited to say that the entire world community of scientists and pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology companies are frantically working 24/7 to find new treatments that are being developed.I'll have to address with scientific vigor about how long will a vaccine take to develop but I think of great concern is what is our manufacturing capacity should we need some of these vaccines all these treatments urgently.

How long will it take to develop a treatment or vaccine?

So let's start the first question is how long will it take to develop a treatment or vaccine first let's even talk about what's the difference between a treatment versus a vaccine because I think there's a lot of confusion around there a vaccine is like that what you have for flu we create a shot a subcutaneous shot and using a vector is sometimes a common cold vector or what we call it add no virus in which we put the sequence of this SARS-COV-2 into this to train and educate your body to recognize this virus and have readily available killer cells to prevent you getting infected that's a vaccine.

Unfortunately that will take a while to develop because testing needs to be done about the effectiveness of that vaccine in giving you true protection on the other hand we have patients that are yellow critically ill mildly ill that we can take a patient that is mildly ill to prevent from becoming critically ill we can take a patient that's critically ill from becoming severely to the point of fatal fatally ill and to understand how we can do that I think treatment for these kinds of patients are much closer at hand this virus works by hijacking a receptor in your body it takes this receptor uses the machinery of the lung and actually replicates and infects the lung to the point of fibrosis and death.

Worse this virus is found a way to evade the immune system it's found a way to actually kill the natural killer cells in your body the T cells in your body from the data again from China what we've discovered is that the patients who die not only are they elderly but they have a low natural killer cell and T cell count so we're beginning to understand this complex biology of this virus and that's why I'm saying we're looking at from a perspective not about the virus but the host so if we could understand the host reaction and create counter-reactions to this we have a shot for treatment.

Blocking the Entry of Virus by Docking on the ACE2 receptor 

So let me speak a little bit about treatment there are multiple strategies the first strategy is to take this concept that the virus has hijacked this receptor in our human body called the ace so this ace receptor is the first port of entry so if we could block the entry of this virus through this ACE receptor we could block the entire cascade of its ability to use the engine and the machinery to regenerate.

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Well happily and luckily we've now had scientists and this is as recently as this month understanding this ace receptor through the power of genomics through the power of supercomputing through the power of protein folding this complex receptor in our human body is now being able to understand and because we can understand this receptor we can find systems to create decoys and sponges so that this receptor cannot be attacked so that the virus can be as a Trojan horse blocked from entering this complex science is now being attacked worldwide by scientists around the world and is a very exciting strategy.

Block the Machinery and the Packaging of the Virus

The other strategy is to say could we block the machinery and the answer to that is yes because we now understand how this virus replicates the third strategy is could we block the what we call the endosomal packaging and block that and what's exciting is we've now discovered potentially and I'm saying this potentially because science is not fully borne out and this is experienced in China that old drugs repurposed can actually block these packaging systems inside the cell of the human cell and ameliorate this disease.

Destroy the Factory (Infected Cell) Itself

And our fourth strategy is to actually kill the factory of the virus itself it turns out the way this virus works in a fast found a way to kill the natural killer cells and T cells of the human body from the results we've seen from China in the patients who had a fit a fatal outcome in the elderly the lymphocytes or what we call the natural killer cells and T cells are depleted significantly depleted whether that's in the effect of the virus or whether the patients are immunosuppressed or had pre-existing conditions including cancer it's not clear yet but what is important and is clear is that these natural killer cells or he sells are depleted.

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However, we have in our innate system the ability to kill infected cells so a very interesting strategy is to activate these natural killer cells that as you could see from this diagram has an ability to identify lock on to and put and really push what they call granzymes and into these cells and destroy them the way it will destroy them it will actually completely almost dissolve the cell and in so doing we can then kill the factory itself so the opportunity here now is not to affect the virus but the factory of the virus and prevent its depletion and in so doing it main induce also a memory or a vaccine and maybe even have a dual effect of reducing the infection killing the infected cell and allowing the patient's own immune system to get reactivated.

Now, these are the four opportunities that now face us as strategies for the scientific community to come together and work frantically towards number one blocking the receptor preventing it from entering number two destroying the machinery preventing it from replicating number three preventing from repackaging and shedding in number for killing the factory itself these are opportunities that gives us hope and I hope will provide some level of comfort that the world working together will be able to find a way to stop this virus stop this pandemic and learn a lot about infectious diseases.