Jaxson Riley, a 9-year-old boy, is participating in a clinical trial for Long Covid. Despite his condition, he enjoys riding his motorized bike with his father on good days.
Jaxson Riley , 9 years old, has Long Covid and is enrolled in a clinical trial . On good days, he likes to ride his motorized bike in the neighborhood with his father.One Monday morning last September, Shelley Hayden pulled into a parking spot in an underground garage at the University of California San Francisco . She switched off the ignition, pushed the red record button on her cellphone, and gazed into the camera. “The time has come,” said Hayden, long dark-blond hair framing her blue eyes.
Deeks describes Long Covid’s effects on the body as “chaos and mayhem,” and he’s circumspect about what most of these early trials can accomplish. “We’re not going to change the world,” he says. That’s partly because scientists’ grasp of Long Covid is still evolving. Clinical trials often hinge on objective measurements such as tumor size, brain lesions, or number of blood cells. Long Covid lacks these markers, making it tougher to determine whether a treatment is working.
Griffin has long been a passionate student of RNA viruses, of which SARS-CoV-2 is one example. Early in her career, she hewed to the scientific orthodoxy at the time that such viruses couldn’t persist in the body. That’s because unlike certain DNA viruses, such as Epstein-Barr and herpesviruses, RNA viruses can’t typically shut off their replication and lie dormant in cells for years.
“I think virus persistence, if true, is at the heart of all the other problems of Long Covid,” including a dysfunctional immune system, says Petter Brodin, a pediatric immunologist at the Karolinska Institute and Imperial College London.Some treatment trials are targeting immune dysfunction, for example with immune-modulating treatments such as the rheumatoid arthritis drug baricitinib. Others are now taking direct aim at lingering virus.
Yet another strategy involves delivering monoclonal antibodies designed to bind to and eliminate lingering virus. A small but intriguing report on that tactic appeared in October 2023 in. It described three Long Covid patients who received a COVID-19 monoclonal antibody months after their original infection, either to treat a second bout of the virus or prevent illness following an exposure. What happened next was striking.
“Being able to say, ‘I have Long Covid,’ and have a piece of paper that points” to that is invaluable, says Matthew Dunn, an 18-year-old in the Boston area who’s had Long Covid for 2 years. He’s now a research intern in Yonker’s lab, studying the syndrome. Dunn was bedbound for almost a year but managed to graduate from high school in June 2023. He estimates he’s still only about “60% to 70%” of where he was before getting sick.
Given the unknowns, few trials targeting viral persistence restrict entry to those with detectable virus. Instead, they measure it as best they can throughout the trial, and probe a therapy’s impact in other ways. Brodin has restricted his Paxlovid study to seriously ill Long Covid patients with heart or lung damage visible on imaging, which makes it easier to objectively measure Paxlovid’s effects. He is also monitoring patients’ immune systems, analyzing cells before and after treatment.
Long Covid Clinical Trial Jaxson Riley Motorized Bike Symptoms Treatment
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