|  | - India on Tuesday reported 12,751 Covid cases and 42 fatalities. The cumulative caseload is 4,41,74,650 (1,31,807 active cases) and 5,26,772 fatalities
- Worldwide: Over 585 million cases and over 6.42 million fatalities.
- Vaccination in India: Over 2.06 billion doses. Worldwide: Over 12.01 billion doses.
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| | TODAY’S TAKE | | Researchers help future-proof Covid-19 treatments |  | - Researchers from the University of Kent and the Goethe-University in Frankfurt have identified new therapies for Covid-19 that could help improve the treatment of vulnerable Covid-19 patients.
- The study: The team tested the sensitivity of different SARS-CoV-2 variants like Omicron and Delta to combinations of the four currently approved antiviral drugs with betaferon – an additional class of antiviral drug that is also naturally produced in the body and protects it from virus infections.
- Currently, there are three approved antiviral drugs for the treatment of COVID-19: Remdesivir, molnupiravir, and nirmatrelvir (the active agent in paxlovid). In addition, there’s aprotinin, an approved drug whose anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity was discovered by the same research team.
- The findings: The team found new combination therapies that are highly effective in cell culture experiments and that may reduce the formation of novel variants.
- The findings, published in the Journal of Infection, revealed that interferon combinations with molnupiravir, nirmatrelvir, and aprotinin were much more effective than interferon combinations with remdesivir. This may explain why remdesivir/interferon combinations have so far shown limited improvement compared to remdesivir alone.
- They add that aprotinin displayed the strongest synergism with betaferon against the BA.1 and BA.2 strains among all tested drugs.
- Implications: “If these findings are confirmed in patients, I hope that more effective therapies will help us to reduce the formation of novel dangerous Covid-19 variants,” says co-author Jindrich Cinatl.
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| | TELL ME ONE THING | | The gut factor in protecting against Covid-19 |  | - There’s a growing body of evidence establishing the connection between the gut microbiome, the severity of Covid-19 infection, and persistent long-haul symptoms. A recent metagenomics analysis of 15 Covid-hospitalised patients revealed that their faecal microbiomes were deficient in beneficial commensals and abundant in pathogens.
- Now a new study on mice and hamsters by researchers in the US underscores the significance of fibre-fermenting gut bacteria that release short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which limit viral entry and hypercoagulation and induce an immune-mediated antiviral response.
- The researchers basically define multiple pathways by which the gut microbiome protects mammalian hosts from SARS-CoV-2 intranasal infection, both locally and systemically, via production of SCFAs.
- The study, published in the journal Gut Microbes, claims that in the gut and lungs, SCFAs inhibit ACE2 expression. To remind you, ACE2 receptors mediate the entry of SARS-CoV-2 into host cells.
- The team also found that SCFA treatments decreased viral loads in the tested rodents and enhanced adaptive immunity against SARS-CoV-2 chimeras.
- “We found that SCFAs affected Ace2 expression and antibody neutralisation only in male mice, but found no sex differences in the effect of SCFAs on the coagulation response [and hence, platelet turnover],” reads the study.
- This is a significant point because dysfunction of the coagulation response has emerged as a hallmark of severe Covid-19, driven in part by hyperinflammation.
- The researchers add that further studies are required to delineate the mechanism underlying SCFA-mediated sex bias in adaptive immunity.
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| Written by: Rakesh Rai, Sushmita Choudhury, Jayanta Kalita, Prabhash K Dutta
Research: Rajesh Sharma
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