Science & Environment

Lung radiation shows promise for COVID-19 pneumonia- smoking raises risks

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(Reuters) – The following is a brief roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Lung radiation may hasten COVID-19 pneumonia recovery

A low dose of radiation to the lungs of COVID-19 pneumonia patients can help them recover more quickly, a small study suggests. Doctors at Emory University in Atlanta treated 10 such patients with lung radiation and compared them to 10 patients of similar ages who received usual care, without radiation. With radiation, the average time to significant improvement was three days, compared to 12 days in the control group.

Other potential effects included a shorter average time to hospital discharge (12 days with radiation versus 20 days without it) and a lower risk of mechanical ventilation (10% with radiation versus 40% without it). But those two differences were too small to rule out the possibility they were due to chance, the researchers found.

The radiation group was “a little older, a little sicker, and their lungs were a little more damaged … but despite that we saw a strong signal of efficacy,” Emory’s Dr. Mohammad Khan told Reuters.

Khan noted that in the radiation group, COVID-19 medications were withheld before and after the treatment, so the results reflect the effect of the radiation alone.

“Radiotherapy,” Khan said, “can reduce the inflammation in the lungs of COVID-19 patients and reduce the cytokines that are causing the inflammation.” Cytokines are proteins made by the immune system. The results on the first five patients have been accepted for publication by the journal Cancer.

The results on all 10 were posted on Tuesday ahead of peer review on the website medRxiv. The researchers have launched a randomized controlled trial of the treatment and expect to eventually include multiple centers. (MRNA.O) experimental vaccine for COVID-19, mRNA-1273, was safe and provoked immune responses in all 45 healthy volunteers in a first-in-humans phase 1 study, researchers reported on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Volunteers who got two doses of the vaccine had levels of virus-killing antibodies that exceeded the average levels seen in recovered COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose researchers developed Moderna’s vaccine candidate, called the results good news. Fauci noted that the study found no serious adverse events and the vaccine produced “reasonably high” levels of virus-killing or neutralizing antibodies.

“If your vaccine can induce a response comparable with natural infection, that’s a winner,” Fauci told Reuters. “That’s why we’re very pleased by the results.” A phase 2 trial testing the vaccine’s efficacy in a larger group started in May.

A much larger phase 3 trial to confirm efficacy and identify rare side effects will begin this month, ultimately including 30,000 participants. Separately, early-stage human trial data on a vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca (AZN.L) and Oxford University will be published on July 20, the Lancet medical journal said on Wednesday. (reut.rs/3hemOs3bit.ly/30aFwtD)

Open here in an external browser for a Reuters graphic on vaccines and treatments in development.

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