Coronavirus will probably never disappear and a vaccine won’t stop it completely. He also said that ministers and experts should stop ‘over-promising’ and be realistic about the prospects of a vaccine and the likely timeline of one, unlikely before spring next year. Warnings and those of his colleague Professor Chris Whitty that the COVID-19 fight will be a long one, and it will be with us for good. So, from this should we assume there is no ‘silver bullet’ for COVID-19 infections? What if there were a single treatment that:
- Could stop the infection in its tracks
- Was anti-inflammatory; controlling the immune system’s response to the infection and stopping it from overreacting dangerously.
- In cases where patients developed secondary bacterial infections in the lungs could supercharge antibiotics; boosting their efficacy and eve, was a repurposed drug; already proven as safe.
- was easy to make, scalable at the level required to make a difference in the pandemic and was cost effective, then wouldn’t that be something we should all be getting excited about?
Surely though no such ‘silver bullet’ game changing therapy exists? After all, the only treatments we hear about for COVID are those which President Trump took, which were either very new, expensive and experimental or have a very narrow application to a particular aspect of the disease. Well, you heard it here first – such a ‘silver bullet’ treatment does exist today. It’s called Nylexa®, from the small UK biotech company NovaBiotics Ltd. It’s active ingredients have been safely used in medicines that treat unrelated conditions for over 30 years.
NovaBiotics discovered Nylexa’s potential benefits in COVID-19 following a decade of research in difficult to treat, drug-resistant infections, including the complex chest infections and inflammation associated with cystic fibrosis (CF) lung disease. In March they applied for a £1m grant from Innovate UK (representing the government) to start clinical studies. That grant was eventually awarded earlier this month, and the government are now considering whether or not to include Nylexa on two separate NHS platform studies.
