Fermented Carica papaya and Morinda citrifolia as Perspective Food Supplements for the Treatment of Post-COVID Symptoms: Randomized Placebo-Controlled Clinical Laboratory Study.

Food supplements based on fermented Carica papaya and Morinda citrifolia, known for their immune modulating, redox balancing, and anti-inflammatory effects, were added to conventional treatment protocols prescribed to patients recovering after severe and moderate COVID-19 disease in order to alleviate long-lasting post-COVID symptoms. A randomized single-center placebo-controlled clinical laboratory study was designed and performed (total number of participants 188, with delta variant of virus 157, with omicron 31). Clinical statuses were assessed using computer tomography, electrocardiography, a questionnaire, and physical endurance. Plasma cytokines (IL-6, IL-8, IL-17A, and INF-gamma), nitrate/nitrite ratio, antioxidant activity (AOA), and polymorphonuclear leukocyte (PMN) ATP levels were determined before and 20 days following the addition of 28 g of fermented supplements twice per day. The capacity of PMN to phagocyte and the oral-nasal-pharyngeal microbiota were assessed. Clinical symptoms, IL-6, IL-8, and nitric oxide metabolites diminished significantly compared to the placebo group and their background expression. The PMN capacity to phagocyte, AOA, and ATP content remarkably increased. The oral-nasal-pharyngeal microbiota were unchanged. On these grounds, we suggest that fermented tropical fruits could efficiently diminish post-COVID clinical symptoms through several immune-modulating, redox balancing, and pro-energy mechanisms.

Downstream Processing of Therapeutic Peptides by Means of Preparative Liquid Chromatography.

The market of biomolecules with therapeutic scopes, including peptides, is continuously expanding. The interest towards this class of pharmaceuticals is stimulated by the broad range of bioactivities that peptides can trigger in the human body. The main production methods to obtain peptides are enzymatic hydrolysis, microbial fermentation, recombinant approach and, especially, chemical synthesis. None of these methods, however, produce exclusively the target product. Other species represent impurities that, for safety and pharmaceutical quality reasons, must be removed. The remarkable production volumes of peptide mixtures have generated a strong interest towards the purification procedures, particularly due to their relevant impact on the manufacturing costs. The purification method of choice is mainly preparative liquid chromatography, because of its flexibility, which allows one to choose case-by-case the experimental conditions that most suitably fit that particular purification problem. Different modes of chromatography that can cover almost every separation case are reviewed in this article. Additionally, an outlook to a very recent continuous chromatographic process (namely Multicolumn Countercurrent Solvent Gradient Purification, MCSGP) and future perspectives regarding purification strategies will be considered at the end of this review.