Israel’s ‘breakthrough’ first phase trial of COVID drug treatment

ABSTRACT

AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT Abstract A drug that successfully cured 29 of 30 cases of COVID-19 in Israeli hospital patients in 2-5 days has been hailed as a “huge breakthrough”, reports The Daily Telegraph. The EXO-CD24 substance was developed at the Ichilov Medical Centre in Tel Aviv and successfully completed its first phase of clinical trials. The treatment was given to 30 patients with coronavirus, whose conditions ranged from moderate to severe. Twenty-nine of the patients were then discharged from the hospital in the following three to five days, while one patient took slightly longer to recover. A protein known as CD24 is delivered to the lungs by exosomes in the drug, which helps to rebalance the immune system and prevent it from overreacting to the virus