The Most Promising Drug For Long Covid You've Never Heard Of | With Dr Wes Ely

hi and welcome back in this film the first of two Dr Assad KH and I ask intensive care physician Dr Wes elely about how he became involved in Long coid what it takes to get large scale treatment trials off the ground and why there's one in particular he's excited about and we are too hope you find it interesting thank you so much for joining us W absolute pleasure to talk to you um I was wondering if we could start off by just if you could tell us a little bit about your professional history and how that led you to come into contact with what we're calling long cavid and people who are suffering with long cavid my name is Wes elely and I am a practicing intensivist so ICU doctor at Vanderbilt University which is in Nashville Tennessee you can see that I've got this gray hair I'm kind of an old guy I'm 59 years old and I've been practicing medicine for over 30 years so my area of expertise is that I clinically take care of people who undergo acute illnesses that have major ramifications for their life and I study that situation so we design here at our Research Center large cohort studies in the neighborhood of thousands of patients and clinical trials and we get them funded by the NIH the VA we have currently about $36 million in in Ni funding with our next round of long coid money we probably will have it in the $60 million range to do real science to help reduce human suffering at the beginning of coid most most of coid patients were getting tremendously ill PRI of the time of vaccines and were Landing in our ICU so I was caring for critically ill patients in the ICU with coid and I was getting emailed from people all over the world because I had done all this work on delirium and the rapid acquisition of dementia and so people were writing to me and saying Wes this is crazy their brains are totally out what's going on let's study it so we designed a study called the coid D study coid delirium study and we published it in Lan at respiratory of 20 2,100 acutely ill coid patients this is how it got connected to Long Co I started thinking well all of this is just pck it's it's post-intensive care syndrome which we've been studying for 20 years and then people started contacting me and here's where I learned I was wrong I mean I was so wrong people started contacting me saying I can't think anymore my brain and body don't work and I was never in the hospital I got coid and I was all only mildly ill at my house and I got a little better for two three months then 100 days later bam uh this hit me like a ton of bricks and I started realizing wow it's not all pcks post-intensive care syndrome there's two or three problems going on one is IC survivors with piics two are people who who never were critically ill but get long coid and then there's a third group who have both and I wrote this article in stat news called something like don't silence coid patients with long Co and it went Bonkers it was just uh on Twitter virally spread Etc and I realized I struck a nerve kind of like you jez when you started putting these YouTube posts up and everybody was responding to you like they wanted to talk and and you were a great ear so that's how I got connected with long Co and basically as a scientist I've never looked back I was like this is fascinating area people are suffering like crazy it fits in with everything I do about acute problems in a human body that we don't understand enough let's care for these people clinically and let's find them scientific answers so what is um the most interesting research that you've either seen or been involved with that might explain some of the pathophysiology of what's going on yeah well this is a this is a fascinating story and it starts in in the UK an investigator named Justin stebbing and colleagues asked a computer what the computer thought would be the best drug for Co and so the computer in this Lancet paper and the computer computer spits out this series of after five 600 drugs here are the drugs we think will work and here's the main drug we think will work and that drug was a jack stat inhibitor that's currently FDA approved for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and alopecia Arata it's called barit so I have no Financial conflicts of interest by the way with this drug I have not accepted a single penny for any of this research and won't accept any because I don't want the listeners to think that I'm making any money off this I have no stock in this company anything and anyway an HIV researcher and I Vince Marone worked with him and designed this very large clinical trial done in 12 countries uh 1500 people and it became the largest survival advantage of any drug in the coid era I'll say it another way we did a double blind Placebo control trial of Barry versus placebo for acute Leo coid patients anybody on oxygen and we had the largest survival advantage of any drug including steroids toal loab Pax lovid any of those drugs and it got FDA approved it's top tier for World Health Organization approval for acute coid and we made the company we we said if we're going to do this and if it works we want you to make it available for lmc's lower middle- inome countries so millions of people have gotten that drug for free all over the world which I I'm just I'm a big Public Health advocate so I think this is a great thing anyway now we want to study that same immunomodulator in long coid and I can talk more about that if you want me to please yeah so so as we began learning about Lanova began realizing that what's happening in the human body is that the virus comes in comes into the rester epithelium denudes and trashes the resp respiratory epithelium a pneumonia occurs but the virus is also attract obviously attaching to the A2 receptor which are on the lining of blood vessels so your blood vessels have this beautiful endothelium on both sides and in that endothelium those cells there is the same H2 receptor so that and other receptors in the brain are places that the virus is inducing pathology and not only is it inducing pathology during the acute event but something happens to the immune system that essentially turns on a light switch so that the immune system becomes chronically uh agitated and active and we think there's ongoing antigenic stimulation long after weeks and months after the acute viral illness is gone which leads to Long coid or's at least part of the long Co Story part of it could be viral reactivation immune reactivation there's all kinds of ways we're fighting our own self during that time autoimmunity and then there are other theories as well of long Co but one of them at least is this disregulated autoimmunity and so we think that it might be helpful this is the hypothesis the hypothesis is that we will improve long coid symptomatology by giving an immunomodulator to people who have active long coid disease or the syndrome and I am an investigator who studies a lot about rapidly acquired dementia so PX creates uh in many in too many people millions of people and a rapidly acquired dementia process and it looks a lot phenotypically like long CO's cognitive impairment so that's why we're interested in studying immunomodulation and long coid with the primary outcome being the brain brain recovery and the secondary outcome being cardiovascular outcomes like POTS disease poal orthostatic teoc cardio syndrome so what do you need to do to get this trial up and running like where are you at in that how how do you want to design it how's it going to work how long is it going to take so I'll show you I'm reaching over my desk here so this is a uh for your YouTube this is visual this is a gr this is a 470 page Grant which I wrote um and I sent to the NIH and what happens is that we write these grants we see if we can get Federal funding for them because it takes millions of dollars to do such a trial and we are hoping that this grant gets funded I'm gonna only reveal so much right now because I don't want to get ahead of myself but I think that we uh are in a place where eventually we'll be doing this trial I'm just going to avoid specifics because I don't want people to uh you know hold me to different dates and such but we are extremely actively planning this clinical trial it's called reverse long coid or reverse LC we will do this with investigators from Emory and University of California San Francisco Minnesota Vanderbilt we will do our absolute best to have patient Le Representatives they they're already on our administrative and scientific team so we we are listening to the long Co community and we are going to design this clinical trial in a way that the long Co Community will be proud to be a part of it that we will be sensitive to their needs the for example when they're having a flare uh that we don't want them to feel obligated to do things related to the trial that will worsen their flare we will make it so that we will be user friendly to the patients who are enrolled in this clinical trial and what they will do is they will come in get strained if they have long coid and fit the entry criteria and no exclusion criteria they'll get randomized to either receive Placebo or bear a sitb for 6 months and we will measure their Baseline brain function 6month and 12month brain function as well as cardiovascular function we're going to we're very sensitive to the mecfs community we'll be measuring mecfs parameters as well because we know there's a tremendous overlap with mecfs and we'll be doing all of this with some of the best immunologists and scientists in the world and I am I am just a member of this team I'm a cog in the wheel I view myself as a public servant of the long Co community and that's how we're going to try and get this off the ground and done if the National Institute of Health provides this funding which it's looking very positive amazing to hear that best of luck it's our privilege it's it's been a it's been a real labor of love I've spent way too many long nights sitting right here at this desk and my two rules for research are that I I only study things where either answer matters and I only study that I study what what you have a lot of we have right now a lot of long coid and whatever we find with this imuno modulator is important I actually uh this is I make no money off this book I wrote this book last year it's called every deep drawn breath it won the Christopher award for works that Meet The Motto it's better to Light One Candle than to curse the darkness so what we're trying to do here is light candles instead of curse the darkness and and every penny from this book goes back to Long Co p patients and their families I've certainly got my fingers crossed that the Reversed long Co trial with Baris CIB gets proper funding because we do need more large well-planned trials just like this in the next film with Dr wesely drad KH andai discussed how he's treating long coid patients right now and what his dream list would be for other treatment trials just a quick word on a couple of other things if you're not aware of the long coid handbook and you happen to want a single resource that brings everything we know about the condition together well perhaps you should be links in the description and a quick shout out for my second Channel flip the script where I break down from an Insider perspective why big films and TV shows work or don't again links in the description look after yourselves until next time

Channel: Gez Medinger

Views: 38,123

Keywords: pasc, psac, post covid, syndrome, LC, long corona, covid, sars

Id: GYi9NJelm2A

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023