Serhat Gyumryukcu, a Turkish scientist working at an American institute, and his team are making progress in working on a drug that can eliminate the coronavirus in the body in 48 hours, Sabah reported.
Gyumryukcu, a graduate of Dokuz Aylul University in western Turkey, holds a doctorate in immunology and oncology and has been working on research on cancer, infectious diseases and cell and gene therapy against these diseases in the United States since 2013.
He runs a research laboratory at the Seraph Research Institute, which he set up in Los Angeles.
The young scientist and his team are behind a study of a treatment method that uses the key protein enzymes SARS-CoV-2 to eliminate the virus at the cellular level.
The method, called “Hijack RNA”, manages to neutralize and kill the virus in animal experiments for 48 hours.
Gyumryukcu recently presented the study at an online conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infections and applied to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for human testing.
If successful in human experiments, the drug developed by this method can be used at intervals of nine to 10 months as an oral spray, both as a treatment and as protection against the coronavirus.
Scientists are also working to prevent other potential coronavirus-related pandemics in the future with this new method.
He told the Anatolian news agency that Gyumryukchyu first came up with the idea for the Hijack RNA three years ago, in an attempt to develop a different response mechanism against viral infections.
“Scientists usually focus on developing drugs that block viruses by targeting their enzymes.
In the treatment model we developed, the drug interacts with enzymes and signals cells and the virus to self-destruct.
We tested it on hepatitis B infections before the coronavirus pandemic. Like other laboratories around the world, we decided to focus our research on the coronavirus.
“I redesigned the mechanism I developed against hepatitis B by changing the genetic code and the protein code of drugs,” he said.
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