Adjunctive treatment in COVID-19 and sepsis-What did we learn?

Abstract

The introduction of anakinra, baricitinib and tocilizumab into the treatment armamentarium of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reinforced the concept of immunotherapy for bacterial sepsis. The current review investigates how the example of COVID-19 may be extrapolated to sepsis using athree-step approach. In the first step, the clinical evidence on how the immunotherapy of COVID-19 assisted viral clearance is presented. In asecond step, the indications acquired from human and animal studies on the need to employ strategies with primary effective phagocytosis in sepsis are presented. In afinal step, lessons learnt from COVID-19 immunotherapy are applied for sepsis. The end result is that sepsis immunotherapy should rely on the use of biomarkers which provide information on the activation of aspecific prevailing mechanism in order to enable the selection of the appropriate drug.