After the onset of coronavirus infection, the virus was detected for a long period of time despite antiviral treatment, and we succeeded in treating a seriously ill patient suffering from pneumonia.

This is the first case of treating a patient with long-term corona infection, for whom there was no treatment method until now, with a domestically developed cell therapy by administering a viral antigen-specific T-cell therapy.

Professor Lee Rae-seok’s research team from the Department of Infectious Diseases at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Catholic University of Korea announced that they had administered autologous virus-specific T cell therapy to two patients who were long-term infected with ‘SARS-Coronavirus-2’.

Corona patients with weakened immune systems, including patients with blood cancer such as malignant lymphoma, autoimmune diseases taking immunosuppressants, and HIV-infected patients, have limited humoral immunity due to antibody production, which causes virus replication and excretion even when antiviral treatment is administered. cannot be stopped.

If this infection continues for a long time, it can progress to severe pneumonia and eventually lead to death.

One of them was a 79-year-old patient being treated for blood cancer (lymphoma). After being infected with the coronavirus, the patient continued to not respond to prescriptions for antiviral drugs. The virus was detected for 3 months, progressed to severe pneumonia, and eventually stopped chemotherapy. am.

The research team used a coronavirus multi-antigen-specific T cell therapy produced by LucasBio (CEO Professor Cho Seok-gu), a cell therapy venture company at the same university.

After collecting the patient’s own blood, we stimulated it with three multi-antigens (Spike, Nucleocapsid, and membrane) known as major antigens for SARS-coronavirus to manufacture a coronavirus antigen-specific T cell therapy that can respond to mutations, and administered it twice. It was administered.

Afterwards, to objectively evaluate clinical recovery, the WHO Corona Patient Evaluation Ranking Scale (ordinal scale), symptom recovery score (NEWS2 score), and chest CT were used to check the degree of recovery from pneumonia.

As a result, all patients who had been infected for a long time tested negative in the PCR test, and all clinical symptoms such as cough, fever, and breathing difficulties caused by the coronavirus disappeared, and all oxygen treatment was discontinued. In addition, the final chest CT scan confirmed that the ground-glass shaded nodules disappeared and the severe pneumonia was completely cured.

Professor Lee Rae-seok said, “Cells were produced by stimulating with SARS-Coronavirus-2 multiple antigens using autologous immune cells targeting severely immunocompromised patients who had no treatment, refractory patients who did not respond to existing treatment, and long-term coronavirus patients. “This is the first success in Korea where a treatment has been administered,” he said.

Professor Lee continued, “As a result of analyzing the patient’s blood after administration of virus-specific T cell therapy, we confirmed that it gradually increased after 7 days of cell therapy administration and was directly related to clinical recovery indicators.” He added, “Through additional analysis, the immunological mechanism “We will expand it to treat severe respiratory virus infections,” he said.

2024-02-28 11:50:00

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