Researchers from Sechenov University together with Russian and Iranian colleagues described currently known approaches to the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection. In the paper published in Journal of Molecular Medicine, they wrote about how different groups of drugs worked and how promising each approach was.

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SARS-CoV-2 - a coronavirus that caused the pandemic in early 2020 - is a close relative of two other viruses (SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV) that triggered epidemics in 2003 and 2013-2015. Most often, the disease is accompanied by fever, dry cough, increased fatigue, and loss of taste and smell. Most symptoms are associated with an overreaction of the patient's immune system, which, in severe cases, causes damage to lung tissue and systemic inflammation.

The first approach considered in the article is immunotherapy. It is known that antibodies contained in the serum of people who have had a viral disease can speed up the recovery of other patients. Despite the simplicity of this method, it has several limitations: the number of potential donors is still small, the activity of antibodies decreases over time (which is why the serum from the patients who had the disease long ago is less valuable), and the antibodies themselves can help the virus spread in the body - a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement of infection.