BALTIMORE (WMAR) — When Johns Hopkins husband and wife researchers started developing a drug to treat inflammation 15 years ago, they had no idea it would become heartbreakingly personal.
They are confident it can help COVID-19 patients, though it’s too late to save some of their family members.
“It’s been especially hard because we think they would have benefited from this therapy,” said Johns Hopkins critical care doctor Sujatha Kannan.
Since the pandemic began, Kannan and her husband have lost four close family members to the virus. Kannan’s parents were visiting family in India, set to return to the U.S. when the pandemic hit.
“We discovered that the nanomedicines that I was working on have a propensity to specifically target inflammatory cells wherever they are,” said Rangaramanujam. “It was a very unusual and extremely practical way to target inflammation that plays a significant role in brain disorders, lung disorders, ocular disorders and cancer.”
Fast forward to 2020, it became clear that severe inflammation was the hallmark of COVID-19, happening not only in the lungs but throughout the body, shutting down multiple critical organs. It’s often the main cause of death and lingering long COVID symptoms.
“It was almost unbelievable was the degree of inflammation that was happening,” said Kannan. “So when this happened, the first thing that struck us was we have this product. We have a therapy that we are obviously looking at one or two organs but then when there’s inflammation that’s happening throughout the body, this therapy could target these cells specifically.”
They wanted to find out if OP- 101 could help. Their startup company through Johns Hopkins called Ashvattha Therapeutics performed a small trial to figure out dosage and it worked stunningly well.
