Nanoparticle therapy may help patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 infections

Researchers at the USA’s Johns Hopkins Medicine say that an experimental dendrimer nanoparticle treatment called OP-101 substantially reduced the risk of death and need for a ventilator in a study of 24 severely ill adults hospitalized with COVID-19.

Results of the small clinical trial, funded by Ashvattha Therapeutics, a Johns Hopkins start-up company that makes the drug, specifically found that patients who received it had a greater than fourfold higher rate of decrease in biomarkers of inflammation and brain injury circulating in their blood compared with patients who received a placebo.

“OP-101 could be a potent therapy for decreasing hyperinflammation and promoting repair in people with severe COVID, showing significant clinical benefit without the associated side effects typically seen with some other treatments,” says Sujatha Kannnan, professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.