Early this year, when COVID-19 was still a localized outbreak in China, Eleanor Fish, an immunologist at the University of Toronto, reached out to colleagues in Wuhan to explore the possibility of evaluating interferon therapy in patients infected with the coronavirus. Fish has been studying interferons — proteins produced by the body in response to viral infections — for close to 35 years, and her previous favorable results with a synthetic version during the 2003 SARS outbreak in Canada prompted the idea.
|