He’s got a call with a pharmaceutical company planned in the next half hour. His goal: persuade the company to supply his lab with a drug that might — maybe, hopefully, someday — ease some of the unrelenting symptoms of long COVID.
That picture features a motley cast of molecular and cellular characters that could point scientists toward potential tests and treatments — both are currently lacking. Still, the full long COVID landscape is unquestionably complicated. Assorted actors tangle together in an immunological thicket that can make the disease seem impenetrable.
The difficulty is that long COVID is not just one disease. It’s likely a collection of many diseases, she says, with varying sets of symptoms and triggers. Even defining long COVID is complicated. Last spring, researchers developed Today, in many doctors’ offices and clinics, homing in on a diagnosis means first ruling out other conditions.
But for those who do, it can be a double-edged sword, he says. Turning complement on briefly can knock out some bugs, but keeping it on chronically can damage your cells. in September. In some patients, she and others have also spotted other suspicious signs, like long-slumbering herpes viruses that reawaken and start infecting cells again. “Whether this is a cause or effect ,” Iwasaki says, “we don’t know.” Usually, the immune system keeps these viruses under control.
And though Morgan’s complement work is still at an early stage, he considers it a “strong lead to a potential therapy.” One bright spot is the number of complement-targeting drugs that already exist. Doctors currently use the drugs to treat certain blood disorders and other rare conditions. Morgan and other scientists have tried using some of these drugs to treat severe cases of acute COVID-19 infection, but large-scale trials didn’t pan out.