Table of contents:
- What are anti-complement drugs and what are they used for in COVID-19 patients?
- What is a complement?
- 1,024,298
- 831,330
- 28,855
- Complement blocking drugs
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Until mid-November, there have been at least 4 COVID-19 vaccine candidates that have announced the interim results of the final stages of trials with effectiveness above 90 percent. Even so, vaccines aren't everything. Finding the right drug for the treatment of high-risk patients is still being done. So far there is no cure for COVID-19 that has really produced satisfactory results. One of the most recent, scientists are conducting observations on anti-complement drugs for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.
What are anti-complement drugs and what are they used for in COVID-19 patients?
For almost one year the world has been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. At least dozens of types of drugs have been researched and tested, but there are still few drugs that have been proven to be able to control the severity of the symptoms of COVID-19.
One of them that is quite widely used is dexamethasone. This corticosteroid type drug has been proven to be able to help COVID-19 patients get out of critical conditions by reducing inflammation. In addition, blood plasma therapy is quite capable of dealing with the bad symptoms of COVID-19.
However, there are still many mysteries related to this COVID-19 treatment. Therefore researchers are still trying to test other classes of drugs to help treat COVID-19 patients.
Among the researchers, an immunology professor named Bryan Paul Morgan is testing the promising potential of anti-complement drugs as a treatment for COVID-19.
What is a complement?
Complement is a system consisting of a complex set of proteins that function to regulate the inflammatory response in the blood plasma. This system is an essential part of normal human defense against infection and injury. Under normal circumstances, complement circulates in the blood in an inactive state.
When a foreign microorganism such as a virus enters the body, the complement will be active in a chain to kill the virus, either directly attacking or by giving signals to immune cells.
The way that complement attacks viruses is by releasing something called an activation product. Activation of this system causes local inflammation in the organ or site of infection, for example redness, pain, and swelling.
Morgan calls this complement a double-edged sword, which can damage and kill viruses but can also damage and kill body cells.
In such cases, these active complement will be turned off after the infection has been treated so that it does not damage the body. But in some circumstances, the chain reaction of a set of these complement proteins can get out of control and cause a lot of inflammation. This mostly occurs in conditions of sepsis (a dangerous complication of viral / bacterial infection) when the virus in the blood sends excessive complement.
The activation of complement as a double-edged sword that causes this massive inflammation also appears to have occurred in severe COVID-19 patients. Many scientists and scientific studies have stated that COVID-19 may make complement one of the targets it attacks.
"When looking at the blood of COVID-19 patients, we found a very high 'product activation'. This locks the blood cells and cells lining the blood vessels causing direct damage to the cells, "wrote Morgan who is the director of the Central Institute of Immune Systems Research," Cardiff University, English.
This locking of the blood vessels causes blood to clot and leads to more inflammation. Conditions like these make immunity overreact and get out of control and cause a situation known as a cytokine storm.
Morgan said several clinical trials of COVID-19 treatment have focused on managing cytokine storms and blood clots indirectly on complement.
"Because complement is upstream of all of these targets, anti-complement drugs are important candidates for treating disease (COVID-19)."
COVID-19 Outbreak updates Country: IndonesiaData
1,024,298
Confirmed831,330
Recovered28,855
DeathDistribution MapComplement blocking drugs
Anti-complement drugs or complement inhibitors function to lock in a complement protein called C5. By locking in C5, the anti-complement drugs can stop the chain reaction and stop the inflammatory activity and cell destruction.
Several test reports have been published that describe the use of complement blocking drugs as potent in COVID-19 with moderate and severe symptoms. However, so far all of these reports have only been in the form of small studies, not enough to prove that anti-complement drugs are proven to be effective in treating COVID-19 patients.
However, consistently some of these small studies provide evidence that blocking complement can rapidly reduce inflammation. These preliminary findings have prompted the testing of complement blocking drugs in large clinical trials in COVID-19 patients. A C5 drug called ravulizumab is one that is currently in trials.
