Breakthrough! Queensland team develops new anti-COVID-19 therapy

Researchers in Queensland, Australia, working with a US team, have developed an anti-COVID-19 therapy that reduced the viral load in infected mice by 99.9%.

Professor Nigel McMillan, lead researcher from Griffith University, described the treatment as a process of "searching for and destroying" the virus, with the therapy attacking the potentially deadly virus at a genetic level.

The international team of scientists from the Menzies Health Institute Queensland and the City of Hope research institute in the US began their collaborative research in April last year. Using a "next-generation" approach to virus research, they employed gene-silencing RNA technology to directly attack the virus's genome and thereby stop it from spreading.

Professor McMillan said: "It results in the destruction of the [viral] genome, and the virus can no longer grow. So we inject nanoparticles, and they find the virus and destroy it like a heat-seeking missile." "This is the first time we've been able to package it into particles so it can travel through the blood to attack the virus. It goes into the lungs and actually enters all the lung cells, but it only destroys the lung cells carrying the virus, and this treatment doesn't harm normal cells at all."

Professor McMillan said that although this is "not a cure", it is a therapy that can reduce the amount of virus in the lungs by 99.9%, "so it's almost as good as a cure". He said the therapy could become available as early as 2023, though this depends on the results of the next phase of clinical trials.