Therapeutic Interfering Particles Use is Within Reach for COVID Treatment

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates, new variants emerge that can better evade immunity and spread more widely. This causes an ongoing race in which scientists and pharmaceutical companies must continually test and adapt vaccines to keep up with the latest variant of the virus.

This is similar to how the flu vaccine must be redesigned each year to match the newest strains, although SARS-CoV-2 evolves faster than the flu. Using a fundamentally different approach, scientists at Gladstone Institutes at UCSF Medical Center in Mission Bay discovered a new type of antivirals that can track the evolution of the virus, which significantly reduces the chance that new variants could reduce the efficacy of the treatment.

In a new study published in the journal Cell, the researchers engineered a single-dose treatment for SARS-CoV-2 that can be delivered intranasally. This novel approach is based on the concept of therapeutic interfering particles, often called TIPs, which was pioneered by Gladstone senior investigator Leor Weinberger.

He and his team report the discovery of the first TIP, showing it can inhibit SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, and withstand the virus’s ability to evolve new resistant variants. In animals, they demonstrated that TIPs dramatically reduced the amount of SARS-CoV-2 virus found in the lungs and protected the animals from disease.

“The past two years have impressed upon the world how much we need new antiviral strategies,” says Harmit Malik, professor at the basic sciences division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who was not involved in the study. “The design and use of TIPs has always held incredible promise of providing a simple-to-administer highly effective antiviral strategy that can resist viral adaptation. This study is a true inflection point, showing that the powerful TIPs technology is not just theoretically possible, but imminently within reach.”