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Researchers from the US carried out a study to demonstrate a potential therapy for the Covid-19 infection by providing a boost of rapidly expanded virus-specific T cells to patients.
Tom Henley from Intima Bioscience and colleagues from Harvard Medical School, Harvard University and Weill Cornell Medicine said the booster cells, with enriched antigen-specificity, may provide a treatment that can be used in large-scale therapeutic settings.
“We demonstrate a novel technology platform for the robust and rapid expansion of virus-specific T cells as a potential cell therapy for Covid-19 and other viral pathogens,” wrote the team.
The protective virus-specific T cell therapy could potentially serve as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2 and other pandemic viral pathogens.
“Thus, we propose a similar-in-principle novel antigen-specific adoptive T cell therapy for viral infection predicated on precise T cell viral antigen-specificity,” the team said.
“However, this viral platform requires cell kinetic expansion in days not weeks, thus allowing for the adoptive transfer of immunologically competent T cells in a therapeutically relevant time course in the setting of acute viral infection,” they wrote.
Robust immune response
According to the study, the expanded antigen-specific virus-induced lymphocytes (VILs) demonstrate polyfunctional cytokine responses and acquire a T effector memory phenotype that may contribute to a robust immune response, reported the team.
Implications of the study
The study has shown that this novel technology platform can be used for the robust and rapid expansion of virus-specific T cells as a potential therapy for Covid-19.
“We will explore a timely regulatory path to evaluate the VIL platform technology in a phase I/II clinical trial of SARS-CoV-2-infected patients, should there continue to be an urgent need during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic,” concluded the team.
The findings of the study were published in the journal bioRxiv* while the article undergoes peer review.
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