One of the defining features of Covid-19 is the excessive immune response that can occur in severe cases. This burst of immune overreaction, also called a cytokine storm, damages the lungs and can be fatal.
A team of MIT researchers has developed specialized proteins, similar in structure to antibodies, that they believe could soak up these excess cytokines.
“The idea is that they can be injected into the body and bind to the excessive cytokines as generated by the cytokine storm, removing the excessive cytokines and alleviating the symptoms from the infection,” says Rui Qing, an MIT research scientist who is one of the senior authors of the study.
The researchers have reported their initial findings in the journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics (QRB) Discovery, and they now hope to begin testing their proteins in human cells and in animal models of cytokine release and coronavirus infection.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: Shuguang Zhang, a scientist in MIT’s Media Lab, has been developing antibody-like proteins that can fuse to cytokine receptors and potentially block a “cytokine storm,” which is an excessive immune response that can occur during viral infections. This rendering depicts the secretion of cytokines, the tiny pink bits, from a cell. CREDIT: Scientificanimations.com, CC BY-SA 4.0