Australian scientists make an astounding Covid-19 discovery

Scientists at the University of Sydney have discovered a protein in the lungs that blocks covid and forms a natural barrier against the virus.

The natural protein, LRRC15, works by sticking to the virus like Velcro, preventing it from binding to the most vulnerable cells and reducing the chance of infection.

The startling finding may finally explain why some people suffer severe illness from the virus, while others never get sick or seem asymptomatic.

LRRC15 is not present in humans until the virus enters the body, but appears after infection.

The protein helps activate the body’s response to covid, and the team behind the incredible finding hopes it offers a promising avenue for developing new drugs to fight the virus.

The researchers believe that patients who died from covid-19 did not produce enough protein or produced it too late to make a difference.

This theory is supported by a separate study from London that examined blood samples for LRRC15.

That study found that the protein was lower in the blood of severe covid patients compared to mild covid patients.

Professor Greg Neely, who led the study, said his team was one of three internationally to independently discover the interaction of this specific protein with COVID-19.

The other teams were at Oxford University in the UK and Yale and Brown Universities in the US.

“To me as an immunologist, the fact that there is this natural immune receptor that we didn’t know about, that lines our lungs and blocks and controls the virus, is very interesting,” Professor Neely said.

Postdoctoral researcher and study co-author Dr. Lipin Loo said the LRRC15 protein was much more present in the lungs of people with COVID-19 than in those without it, suggesting it was already helping to protect to people from COVID-19.

“When we stain lungs from healthy tissue, we don’t see much of LRRC15, but then in COVID-19 lungs, we see much more protein,” said Dr. Loo.

“We think this newly identified protein could be part of our body’s natural response to fight infection by creating a barrier that physically separates the virus from our most sensitive lung cells to COVID-19.”

The team hopes their discovery will help develop new antiviral and antifibrotic drugs to treat COVID-19 and other viruses in which pulmonary fibrosis occurs.

They found that LRRC15 is also expressed in fibroblast cells, the cells that control lung fibrosis, a disease that causes damaged and scarred lung tissue.

Covid-19 can cause pulmonary fibrosis and the surprising finding is expected to help fight covid for a long time.

“Now we can use this new receptor to design broad-acting drugs that can block viral infection or even suppress pulmonary fibrosis,” Neely said. There are currently no good treatments for pulmonary fibrosis, he said.