Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) associated with COVID-19 infection is a rapidly deteriorating condition where components of the immune system react excessively and cause severe lung tissue damage, propagated by neutrophils that play a deleterious role and cause life threatening damage to the lungs.
Profs. Granot and Fridlender have developed a neutrophil-specific drug delivery platform. The specificity of this platform provides an opportunity to deliver potentially toxic drugs to neutrophils with minimal effect on other cells in the body.
Using several mouse models of disease, they have proved that this platform may be used to modulate neutrophil function in- vivo.
As neutrophils appear to be an attractive target in treating severe COVID-19 cases, they will study the possibility of utilizing this platform as a potential therapy for severe COVID19 patients.