The nanoviricide approach, if it is safe and effective in humans, is an excellent approach. It would do what immunocells do, attack and destroy the pathogen during infection. The drawback is no immunization, but that just means you take the drug at first sign of infection. (If very safe, can be taken prophylactically). And benefits are several. First, its inherent design means the virus cannot evade it, unlike with T and B cells. Second, viruses can't disable it by infecting it (it's not a cell). Third, it attacks the virus's actual infection vector protein that it must use, so the virus cannot immediately evolve to fight it. Fourth, it shortens and can even avoid the often miserable and sometimes fatal cytokine storm of a natural immuno over-response. Fifth, as it is essentially an artificial immune response, it would be vital to immuno-compromised victims, which include people undergoing cancer treatment, or had organ transients, and anyone over 60. Vaccines don't work well for those folks, no matter how good the vaccine. Some can't even take a vaccine.
It is the almost perfect approach, if it works. A potential concern is that the nanoviricide presents the same part of a protein binding domain, or an effective mimic, as an actual protein the human body uses. In the case of our "coronacide", that would be ACE2. Any natural ligand that needs to bind to ACE2 may (but not necessarily) accidentally bind to our drug, instead of ACE2. What problems might that cause? While it would be very short term, it must still be tested and determined. If this effect is bad and part of the viral infection danger, our drug would be compounding it.
It will be exciting to see if our drug is safe and effective. Hopefully we are making progress on proving that. |
