Scotland testing COVID-19 therapy to boost immune response early in the infection

TC BioPharm, a Scottish biotech firm, has won approval to test an experimental T-cell injection therapy to fight COVID-19 by boosting the immune system early in a coronavirus infection, the Financial Times reports. The six-month trial in Edinburgh will involve harvesting T-cells from healthy people, cultivating a large number of the cells in a lab, then injecting the donor cells into hospitalized patients. A large enough infusion could head off the infection before the patient needs to move to intensive care, and even prevent cytokine storms that ravage patients whose body mounts an overly aggressive immune response.

"We have got some evidence that if you kill the virus effectively early on, then [there] should be no reason for the host to have this overwhelming response," Dr. Nik HiraniNik Hirani at Edinburgh University's Center for Inflammation Research tells FT. TC BioPharm founder and CEO Mike Leek said the trial will focus on gamma delta T-cells, the "bully boys" of the immune system. "They circulate in surveillance mode looking for a fight and are in particular attracted to cells that are stressed either by cancer or viral infection, for which they are our first line of defense," he said.

T-cells decrease in number as people get older, so the injections might be especially helpful for elderly patients.

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