There has been a constant attempt to discover a cure that becomes an ultimate savior from a disease that has caused utter death and destruction in the past eight months. A prolonged lockdown and isolation period could not eliminate a disease that hasn’t been witnessed in the last 100 years.
Authorities, various medical experts, and researchers are trying to develop a vaccine by 2021 to help people protect themselves from coronavirus. But meanwhile, before this vaccine could be finally presented to people and begin its action, researchers are now trying to develop an alternative cure, helping people recover from covid and reduce the mortality risk.
Covid risk is essentially identified in small children and older adults vulnerable to the disease due to a weak immune function. Some older adults are more prone to the virus threat because they have pre-existing health conditions making their bodies even more vulnerable.
A new group of international researchers has observed a more recent possibility of an existing drug that could improve the recovery chances of older adults’ COVID virus. According to these researchers, the current medication is a pre-existing arthritis drug known by the name; baricitinib, which could lower the risk of covid infection in older adults and help cure it.
The study was published in the journal Science Advances, which would become the groundwork or fundamental research for extending this study into empirical research and developing a drug into a repurposed cure for COVID cure.
Repurposed Drugs and Initial Findings of the Study
Previous research conducted by a group of researchers that appeared in the journal ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science claimed that three pre-existing drugs for blood pressure and malaria could be potential repurposed medication for curing covid in its early stages.
Researchers know that developing a vaccine would take its own time. Still, research and studies are ongoing to bring out a competent vaccine for curing the virus finally. But meanwhile, it is safer to hands-on on the pre-existing drugs, which doesn’t require a safety test to be done as developing a new drug would require.
The next challenge is identifying from an extensive drug system the most suitable one to be repurposed into a covid cure. The present study based on arthritis drugs was done with an Artificial Intelligence system that could easily search for the most suitable medication to test.
The new study on arthritis drug baricitinib was first discovered in February 2020, which became the researchers’ initial findings. Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis consume Baricitnib, and AI identified this drug due to two complex mechanisms performed by it.
The first mechanism of this drug is to reduce inflammation, and the other function of this drug is to make it more difficult for the virus to access a person’s cells. The researcher made the use of Baricitnib drug in the clinical settings to treat covid, and this initial clinical data was used in a laboratory test done by the present researcher for this study.
The researchers took forward this experiment by taking 83 people of an average age of 81 years. The patients were taken from the University of Pisa, Italy, and the Albacete Hospital, Spain. All of these patients were either with moderate COVID symptoms or severe symptoms.
After segregating two groups of patients, each was treated differently; one with the arthritis medication and the other group without the drug. After comparing both the groups, the scientist concluded that the group given the arthritis drug Baricitnib did not require mechanical ventilation to survive the covid virus and were less likely to die than the control group, which was not given the medication.
Hence, 34.9 percent of the control group either died or were put up mechanical ventilation, and the other 16.9% of the patients treated with baricitinib survived the symptoms of covid.
Understanding the mechanism of the Arthritis Drug & it’s scope
The above para mentioned that the AI system searched for arthritis drugs as the potential cure for COVID based on two significant mechanisms. With the help of lab-grown human miniature organs, the scientist tried to understand how the arthritis drug is beneficial for a covid patient?
What the scientist found after a close observation made it clear that AI detected actual benefits of the drug, stating that it could reduce inflammation and make it difficult for the virus to access a person’s cells. The main reason for the covid virus affecting a person is an acute respiratory syndrome, which occurs due to an increased response of inflammation to SARS-COV 2 virus in the body.
The out of control inflammatory response to the virus leads to damaging the respiratory system cells and affects other organs in the body. There are other side effects to this increased inflammation, such as the virus’s ability to enter into the body since it can replicate itself to the cells.
The study’s co-lead author Prof. Volker Lauschke, who is an associate professor in Personalized Medicine and Drug Development at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, states that,
This study has also shone a light on exactly how this drug may protect us at the cellular level. This helps us understand why other types of drugs are proving beneficial, or not beneficial, as we help identify other treatments which may tackle COVID-19, and confirms what AI predicted, and what we were hearing from patient case reports.
Thus, the constant on-going search for a vaccine should not stop various medical experts from keeping their work on for an alternative medication that might exists amongst us and becomes a potential cure for covid requiring no safety test.
