A leading light in immunobiology takes us through long COVID, nasal vaccines, and the next frontier of the field.
Editor-at-Large, Medscape; Director, Scripps Translational Science Institute; Professor of Molecular Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CaliforniaServe as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant, or trustee for: Dexcom; Illumina; Molecular Stethoscope; Quest Diagnostics; Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
Well, you are a phenom. I mean just, that's all I can say because I think it was so appropriate that TIME recognize your contributions, not just over the pandemic, but of course throughout your career, a brilliant career in immunology. I thought we'd start out with our topic of great interest on long COVID. You've done seminal work here and this is an evolving topic obviously. I wonder what your latest thoughts are on the pathogenesis and where things are headed.
For instance, in the brain with Michelle Monje's team, we developed a sort of localized mild COVID model of infection and showed that changes in microglia can be seen seven weeks post infection . Look what that yielded. But yeah, this is fascinating because as I think you're getting at is that it may not be the same pathogenesis in any given individual so that all these, and even others might be operative. I guess maybe I first delve into the antibody story as you're well aware, we see after people get COVID a higher rate of autoimmune diseases crop up, which is really interesting because it seems to rev up self-directed immune response.
Yeah, so that's really hard to untangle in people. I mean, David Putrino and my team we're planning a clinical trial using Truvada. Truvada obviously is andrug, but it has reported antiviral activity to Epstein-Barr virus and others. So potentially we can try to interrogate that in people, but we're also developing mouse models that can sort of recapitulate EBV like viral reactivation and to see whether there's any sort of causal link between the reactivation and disease process.
We need to be up to date on vaccines and boosters because those seem to reduce the risk for long COVID and whether Paxlovid can reduce the rate of long COVID at the acute phase for the high risk individual, it seems to be yes, but for people who are not at high risk may or may not be very effective. So again, we just need to be very cautious.
Right. So yeah, that's a little known fact. I mean, of course widespread use of antibiotics has caused some significant issues with resistance and so on. However, when you look at the literature of different types of antibiotics, we have, which includes Neosporin or neomycin, has this sort of unintended antiviral property by triggering Toll-like receptor 3 in specialized cell types known as conventional dendritic cell type 1.
And we try to come up with new concepts about even the role of the immune system in general. For instance, is the immune system only good for fighting pathogens or can it be repurposed for conducting normal physiology in the host? And we came up, which basically is an interoceptive type of T-cells that monitor homeostasis in different tissues and are helping with the normal process of biology as opposed to fighting viruses or bacteria or fungi.
Yeah, it's not impossible, right? There are really rapidly evolving technologies and gene therapies that are becoming online. So it's not impossible to think about engineering in situ as you're suggesting, but we also have to be certain that we are living longer, but also healthy. So we do have to not only just deal with the aging immune system, but preventing neurodegenerative diseases and so on. And the immune system may have a role to play there as well.
2019 Novel Coronavirus 2019-Ncov Wuhan Coronavirus Human Coronavirus HKU1 Human Coronavirus OC43 Hcov-OC43 Human Coronavirus 229E Hcov-229E Corona Virus Covid19 Novel Coronavirus SARS-Cov-2 Post-Acute Sequelae Of SARS-Cov-2 Infection Post-Acute Sequelae Of SARS-Cov-2 Infection (PASC PASC - Post-Acute Sequelae Of SARS-Cov-2 Infectio Long COVID Biologic Therapy
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