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There is good news on the COVID front that involves a cure for people who already have come down with the disease in Israel, and doctors there have reported pretty dramatic results. Mercer Island MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss what it entails.

“The is that they had 30 patients who had moderate to severe COVID-19, and they were given a treatment developed in Tel Aviv as part of a phase one trial, … meant to treat a component of the disease that we talked about, which is the cytokine storm. This is the body’s reaction to the virus, and it’s this overwhelming immunological response that causes the flooding of the lungs and the inflammation of all the organ systems that often leads to death,” he said.

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“So in this case, they deliver an inhaled protein — the CD 24 protein to the lungs — and they found that it really attenuated dramatically the cytokine storm that occurs, and in fact, they cured basically 30 out of 30 patients, and 29 out of 30 of them within just a couple of days. So it was a pretty dramatic response.”

Not only is the treatment inhalable, but it appears at the outset to have fewer side effects than other COVID treatments.

“It’s inhaled once a day for a few minutes at a time, and they do it for five days, and it directly targets the lungs, which is really the site of the cytokine storm. It really differs from other treatments — which we’re giving to the whole body, we’re giving systemically — and have a lot of side effects. This doesn’t really have many side effects associated with it, it appears,” Dr. Cohen said.

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