{"id":180549,"date":"2024-01-15T13:30:59","date_gmt":"2024-01-15T19:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/oral-drug-prevents-death-from-covid-19-in-old-mice-by-reversing-immune-aging"},"modified":"2024-01-15T13:30:59","modified_gmt":"2024-01-15T19:30:59","slug":"oral-drug-prevents-death-from-covid-19-in-old-mice-by-reversing-immune-aging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/oral-drug-prevents-death-from-covid-19-in-old-mice-by-reversing-immune-aging","title":{"rendered":"Oral drug prevents death from COVID-19 in old mice by reversing immune aging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/oral-drug-prevents-death-from-covid-19-in-old-mice-by-reversing-immune-aging2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The immune system deteriorates with age, making COVID-19 particularly deadly in older people\u2014but to date, no clinically available medication addresses this key risk factor. A study published today in <i>Nature<\/i> shows that an oral drug that reverses multiple aspects of immune aging effectively prevents death in a mouse model of COVID-19, suggesting that the medication could be used to protect the elderly patients who are at greatest risk in the pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>In the study, daily doses of BGE-175 (asapiprant) protected aged mice from a lethal dose of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Ninety percent of mice that received the drug survived, whereas all untreated control mice died. BGE-175 treatment was initiated two days after infection, when the mice were already ill, a time-frame relevant to real-life clinical situations in which patients would receive medication only after becoming symptomatic.<\/p>\n<p>The mouse model used in the study closely mirrored the pathological progression of human COVID-19. The mouse-adapted strain of SARS-CoV-2 generated by the researchers caused a disease that shared many of the hallmarks of human COVID-19: accumulation of fluid in the air sacs of the lungs, extensive infiltration of lung tissue by <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/immune+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">immune cells<\/a>, and high levels of pro-inflammatory factors called cytokines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The immune system deteriorates with age, making COVID-19 particularly deadly in older people\u2014but to date, no clinically available medication addresses this key risk factor. A study published today in Nature shows that an oral drug that reverses multiple aspects of immune aging effectively prevents death in a mouse model of COVID-19, suggesting that the medication [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}