US neurologists find a cure for Covid-19 to help the virus fight itself

JawaPos.com US President Joe Biden has announced that the state of the Covid-19 pandemic has ended. However, research into the treatment of Covid-19 in the United States is still ongoing. Recently, a neurologist from a US research institute developed an experimental treatment for Covid-19. The drug makes the Corona virus fight on its own.

The drug, dubbed NMT5, was created by the founding director of the Neurodegeneration New Medicines Center Scripps Research Institute, Dr. Stuart Lipton and a team of scientists. It is a derivative of memantine, an Alzheimer’s drug developed by Lipton in the 1990s.

Now researchers are hoping that Covid-19 NMT5 antiviral will be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). So it can be taken orally by infected people like the previous drug Paxlovid.

How NMT5 works

NMT5 alters the virus-changing cells that Covid-19 normally attaches to so that the virus is no longer able to infect them. Due to the different approaches to attack the virus, NMT5 is believed to be able to prevent the spread of the infection to others.

Neuroscience and neurology professors at the University of San Diego School of Medicine and the Yale School of Medicine discovered this drug.

A peer-reviewed study by Lipton and his team was published Sept. 29 in Nature Chemical Biology. Studies have been conducted on hamsters and claimed to have nearly eliminated the massive bleeding in the lungs that caused death from Covid-19 at autopsies. In the study, it significantly reduced the inflammatory response in hamsters who drank it, compared to hamsters who didn’t drink it.

Additionally, NMT5 is said to be very effective against Covid-19 variants Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron. This drug reduces the ability of the virus to replicate in the host and infect others by up to 95%.

In addition to being taken in pill form, this drug can also be inhaled. This means that it can spread directly to the lungs and nasal passages. Since NMT5 is a combination of two FDA-approved drugs, memantine and nitroglycerin, this drug is believed to be likely safe. The researchers hope that human experimentation can begin in the next few months, at most a year.

Publisher: Edy Pramana

Reporter: Marieska Harya Virdhani