Novel inhaled therapeutic blocks virus replication in lungs

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have invented a new treatment for COVID-19 that may in the future make treating SARS-CoV-2 infections as easy as using an allergy nasal spr.

In a new study published online in the journal Nature Communications, the team shows that these short fragments, called antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), are highly effective at stopping the virus from replicating in human cel.

Anders Näär, professor of metabolic biology at UC Berkeley Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology (NST), said: "Vaccines are having a huge impact, but vaccines are not universal and other approaches are still need.

Because ASO treatment targets a highly conserved part of the viral genome among different variants, it is effective against all SARS-CoV-2 "worrisome variants" in human cells and animal mode.

"If we can design ASOs that target the entire virus family, then when a new pandemic emerges, as long as we know which family the virus belongs to, we can Using nasally delivered ASOs to suppress the early stages of a pandem.

For more than a decade, Näär and his team have been studying how these molecules might be used to modify the activity of messenger RNAs and microRNAs in the body, potentially reversing diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and Duchenne muscular dystrop.

In collaboration with scientists at UC Berkeley Associate Professor Sarah Stanley's lab and the Innovative Genome Institute, the team set out to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus against hundreds of different AS.

It turns out that if you bind ASO to this hairpin, it dissolves the hairpin and the RNA forms a straight line rather than a bubble structu.

When they injected ASOs into the noses of infected hamsters and mice, the team found that they were also highly effective in preventing and treating COVID-19 infecti.

Since the hairpin loop structure is present in all known SARS-CoV-2 variants, ASOs should be effective against all varian.

"[SARS-CoV-2] entered the human body and hijacked our own machine to become a copier, producing massive copies of the virus for more infection and transmission, and we were able to find the key to allowing the copier to function in the viral RNA code, all variants including Delta and Omicron share the same key co.

The team has identified an additional ASO target in the genetic code of all SARS family viruses, including the SARS-CoV-1 virus that caused the 2002 SARS outbreak, Näär repor.

The team will need to conduct more experiments before ASOs can be approved for clinical trials in huma.

An intranasal ASO therapeutic targeting SARS-CoV-2