Extreme immunotherapy: emergency immunology to defeat pandemics

Douglas F Nixon,Daniela Marín-Hernández,Nathaniel Hupert

doi:10.1186/s10020-021-00366-4

Abstract

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the gap between modern biology’s ability to investigate and respond to a novel pathogen and modern medicine’s ability to marshal effective front-line interventions to limit its immediate health impact. While we have witnessed the rapid development of innovative vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 using novel molecular platforms, these have yet to alter the pandemic’s long-term trajectory in all but a handful of high-income countries. Health workers at the clinical front lines have little more in their clinical armamentarium than was available a century ago—chiefly oxygen and steroids—and yet advances in modern immunology and immunotherapeutics suggest an underuse of extant and effective, if unorthodox, therapies, which we now call “Extreme Immunotherapies for Pandemics (EIPs).”

Highlights

This perspective takes the position that there will be future pandemics, or epidemics with potential to turn into pandemics
The World Health Organization (WHO) provides a list of current potential pathogens, under its R & D blueprint list of prioritizing diseases for research and development in emergency contexts, and these include: COVID-19; Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever; Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease; Lassa fever; Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS); Nipah and henipaviral diseases; Rift Valley fever; Zika and ‘Disease X’ (WHO 2021)
We still do not have the studies to tell whether common non-specific agents have some general effect in COVID-19, while drugs that were widely used such as hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin only are known to not have a beneficial effect (WHO 2021; Bartoszko 2021)

Summary

Introduction

This perspective takes the position that there will be future pandemics, or epidemics with potential to turn into pandemics. 69th Street, New York, NY 10065, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease (WHO 2021).

Results

Conclusion