Covid, the ‘gateway’ to human cells discovered

A new precision strategy will come from Italian scientific research to hinder the coronavirus infection and its rapid spread among cells, destined to be the basis of a new drug, for which a patent has already been filed. The road that will lead to the drug began with the study promoted by the Italian Institute of Technology, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Oisa, University of Milan, now published in the journal “Pharmacological Research”, an organ of the “International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology “. Scientists Paolo Ciana (University of Milan, professor of Pharmacology), Vincenzo Lionetti (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, professor of Anesthesiology), Angelo Reggiani (Italian Institute of Technology, senior researcher and principal investigator in pharmacology) questioned the possibility of preventing the progressive advancement of infection by any variant of Sars-CoV-2, by blocking the Ace2 receptor, or the ‘door’ that the coronavirus uses to enter human cells. For this purpose, scientists have patented a new approach, the first step of what will become a drug, based on the use of a DNA aptamer, or a short oligonucleotide strand, capable of binding specifically to the K353 residue of Ace2 making it inaccessible to the spike protein of any coronavirus. The three inventors, together with collaborators and collaborators, have already identified two anti K353 aptamers, those capable of dose-dependently inhibiting the binding of the viral spike protein to human Ace2 and thus effectively preventing cell infection. ” Thanks to this study – the scientists comment – it will now be possible to develop a new precision therapeutic approach to prevent contracting infection with Covid-19 in a severe form, without stimulating the immune system or having important side effects related to the most famous drugs consisting of monoclonal antibodies or other therapeutic proteins. In this sense, in fact, the potential toxicities of nucleic acids as drugs are far lower than other innovative drugs such as monoclonal antibodies or other therapeutic proteins “.