Vaccines aren’t the best at protecting against virus variants because they focus on a specific strain. According to a recent Medgadget article, a team of researchers at Northwestern University has a new strategy to fight the virus that is unlikely to be affected by changes in future variants. They discovered natural extracellular vesicles in the blood that act as a decoy binding site for viral particles and prevent them from binding to and infecting cells.
The vesicles contain the ACE2 protein, which happens to be the cellular target of SARS-CoV-2, ADA COVID-19. Since the virus doesn’t discriminate where it binds to a protein, it will harmlessly bind to the evACE2 nanobubbles as they float around in the bloodstream, rather than vulnerable cells. Since evACE2 already occurs naturally in the body, it’s very likely that they will be well received as a treatment. A video with more info can be seen here.
