Will EXO-CD24, the New Drug from Israeli, Bring COVID-19 to an End?

Recently, the issue that Israeli medical staff obtained a new drug named EXO-CD24 with remarkable curative effect on COVID-19 infection are making a lot of headlines on domestic media. The latest results of EXO-CD24 show that it has a very positive treatment effect on patients infected with COVID-19, especially the critically ill patients, and 90% of them can achieve a full recovery within one week. This discovery has brought tremendous hope to people, and it is said that the drug may bring SARS-CoV-2 to an end. Therefore, this article aims to make an analysis of this new drug. 

The result of curative effect is positive, despite the limited number of clinical trials. 

Earlier results of clinical trials of the drug are as follows. The conditions of 19 out of 21 patients who got tested were improved significantly within days and they were discharged from hospital a week later. As a result, the curative rate of the drug is as high as 90%. Therefore, based on these results, Israeli hospitals claimed that they may have found the cure for the disease of COVID-19 because all the patients can fully recover after received treatment. 

EXO-CD24 is an immune drug that specifically suppresses cytokine storms. 

Although we cannot grasp the detailed structure of EXO-CD24, we have learned that CD24 participates in the autoimmune process of human immune reaction. For instance, the overexpression of CD24 in some cells of human body can continuously enhance the ability of autoimmunity. The main death cause of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients is the intense pulmonary immune reaction, or as known as cytokine storm. Cytokines are very important small molecules in the inflammatory process. EXO-CD24 is a liposome drug that should target at CD24 in the human body or absorb CD24 ligand in lung, and eventually the function of reducing the cytokine storm in lung is realized. If there is no cytokine storm in human body, SARS-CoV-2 is indeed a common virus that can be cured at any time and you just need to wait for self-healing. 

How do drugs work inside of human body? 

This protein named CD24 is transmitted to the lungs through the exosome in the drug, which will help rebalance the immune system and prevent it from overreacting to the virus. Previous reports about this new drug in Israel show that EXO-CD24 can reduce mortality by 50% and 40% of recovery period. EXO-CD24 is designed to mitigate or stop the extreme overreaction of the immune system, that is the so-called cytokine storm. 

The survival rate of severe patients infected with COVID-19 will greatly increase if the efficacy of EXO-CD24 can be determined through a large sample of clinical trials. Before then, the hospitals could only use mechanical ventilation of respirators and high-dose hormone therapy to save a few patients. Moreover, patients rescued in this case may still have to face some inevitable sequelae that will exist for a long time. If companies or hospitals want to buy medical instruments to treat patients, then Pharmasources would be the best choice.

EXO-CD24 is originally a targeted drug against cancer. 

It is reported that EXO-CD24 is originally a targeted drug against some certain types of cancers. In addition, EXO-CD24 is relatively cheap, but it must also be taken once a day for five days. The fact that EXO-CD24 can be used to deal with severe immune overreaction like cytokine storm may indicate that the indications of EXO-CD24 in anti-cancer therapy may be corresponding to systemic cancers that related to immunity such as lymphoma. 

Summary

To sum up, the existing results show that the clinical efficacy is very positive despite the small number of patients participating in the clinical trial of EXO-CD24. It shows that the drug has great potential in treating COVID-19 infection. What's more, we can speculate that these drugs directly act on human cells rather than viruses, and they may have curative effects on various variant types of COVID-19, or will not reduce their curative effects in patients infected with variant viruses. On the other hand, we need to pay further attention to the possible security risk after long-term and wide application, as it is an anticancer drug based on the principle of immunotherapy.