In a paper published in Cancer and Metastasis Reviews and selected by the journal as the featured publication, a team of researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital propose that controlling the local and systemic inflammatory response in COVID-19 may be as important as anti-viral and other therapies. 

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Patients with severe COVID-19 frequently experience a life-threatening immune reaction, sometimes called a cytokine storm, which can lead to respiratory failure, organ damage and potentially death. With no FDA-approved treatment currently available for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, researchers are racing to find ways to stop the virus or the inflammatory overreaction it provokes in its tracks. 

Led by Dipak Panigrahy, MD, of the Cancer Center at BIDMC, and Charles N. Serhan, PhD, DSc, director of the Center of Experimental Therapeutics and a member of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the researchers suggest that a family of molecules naturally produced by the human body may be harnessed to resolve inflammation in patients with severe COVID-19, thereby reducing the acute respiratory distress and other life-threatening complications associated with the viral infection.