After vaccine, Covid therapies are now within reach! And after molnupiravir and Paxlovid – expected to be available by the end of the year – could therapies change everything and use our genes? This is the idea worked on by Pr. Jean-Claude Casanova from the Necker hospital in Paris and his team of international scientists with their study carried out worldwide aiming at observing genetic immunity against Covid.
“His team is currently particularly interested in who can naturally resists this virus” journalist Géraldine Zamansky explains as she has interviewed the professor. She goes on: “For instance, if your partner has been sick, coughing for days by your side and you have not caught it. Well, it is perhaps thanks to a ‘secret weapon’, a genetic particularity that prevented the virus from nesting within your body”. She continues: “To find out, scientists need to examine the genes of as many ‘resisting’ people as possible. This is how they can determine the similarities”.
The idea is to find a virus-resisting gene: “If it is a sort of barrier at the surface of cells, they will try to reproduce it in a laboratory to neutralize the virus”, Zamansky adds. She specifies: “we are not genetically equal to infections”. Over time, the study could change the way we see things in taking care of patients and enable to attack the virus from another angle.
