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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

Importantly, there is so much great work on the horizon, and we thank the authors of this paper for their important findings! 🙏

Check out the study here: frontiersin.org/journals/cel...

Frontiers | A highly divergent sample from a nearly extinct SARS-CoV-2 lineage in a patient with long-term COVID-19

BackgroundAlthough COVID-19 is primarily an acute disease, there are cases of persistent infection, primarily in immunocompromised patients. It is hypothesiz...

frontiersin.org

Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

As long as the virus is mutating and creating new strains, our current vaccines and monoclonal antibodies will only be playing catch-up.

We need to develop new therapies to target all strains of the virus, and also to prevent forward transmission & new cases.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

There is so much more we need to know about this virus:

👉How and why does it persist in the human body?

👉 How can we identify which patients have it?

👉 Which treatments will most effectively clear it?

👉 And how can we prevent forward transmission

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

What does this mean?

COVID is not over. Multiple papers all over the world are pointing to the conclusion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can persist in the human body. This includes Long COVID patients, immunocompromised patients, and - some studies even suggest- even the healthy controls.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

They explain that their paper adds to the growing body of work suggesting that least some variants of concern, including alpha and omicron, initially involved in patients with chronic infection before escaping into the general population.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

The team ran an in-depth analysis and concluded that the patient's variant was unlikely to have been acquired in the local community, as it was not a close enough to match to any circulating variants at the time.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

These results suggests that this patient, like many others, carried a chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection in her GI tract, which had developed these mutations in order to evade clearance by her immune system.

Shockingly, the virus had then made its way out of the GI tract to her upper airway.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

They found that the strain of COVID in this patient's body was most closely related to a variant that had circulated in her area in September 2022 - yet it also had several mutations.

Several of these mutations were consistent with strains commonly found in wastewater.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

What happened?

An international team of researchers from Russia, Italy, Switzerland, South Africa and the UK performed a genetic analysis on a positive nasal swab from an HIV+ patient taken in 2022.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 1d

🚨New case study provides compelling evidence for a shocking conclusion:

👉Not only can the SARS-CoV-2 virus persist in the GI tract, but these chronic infections may eventually give rise to new variants of concern.

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Figure 4 from the paper at https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-and-infection-microbiology/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2025.1623390/full

Caption says:

Figure 4. A schematic representation of the Spike mutations in the patient K sample and their overlap with the mutations that were also observed in the ancestors of VOCs, previously described mutations found in chronic infections, associated with immune evasion, or overrepresented in wastewater samples (see Table 1 for corresponding references). Spike domain coordinates were obtained from ref (Shrivastava et al., 2021).

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 3d

He also emphasized the strong commitment on the part of researchers and practitioners working with LC patients.

Meighan and Dr. Peluso both encouraged patients not to give up hope! Long COVID is truly a massive problem, but they are optimistic that with the right efforts, it can be solved. 🙏

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 3d

Dr. Peluso stressed that urgent investment is needed into biomarker development, in order to properly segment patients into the clinical trials most likely to help them. Pharma investment is also going to be key.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 3d

Meighan raises the important point that although much of the general public has "moved on" from thinking that COVID is a threat, it in fact still is.

🚨A recent study showed that Long COVID is the #1 childhood illness - and adults and children alike are still developing this disease today.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 3d

Really enjoyed this insightful PBS News Hour with Long COVID advocate @meighanstone.bsky.social and leading researcher @michaelpelusomd.bsky.social! #LongCOVID

www.pbs.org/video/long-c...

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PBS News Hour | What to know about RFK Jr.’s efforts to address long COVID | Season 2025

What to know about RFK Jr.’s efforts to address long COVID research and treatments

www.pbs.org

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 9d

Lymph tissue is also highly involved in the immune response, so it will be doubly important to determine the effect on these drugs on this tissue - and that they have no harmful effects as well.

For a full recap of the study, check out this post! 👇

www.reddit.com/r/LongCovidT...

From the LongCovidTrials community on Reddit: New study confirms tenofovir efficacy against SARS-CoV-2! (This includes Truvada!).

Explore this post and more from the LongCovidTrials community

www.reddit.com

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 9d

As a next step for research, the team argues that modeling should be done of how these two drugs affect lymphoid tissue, specifically.

They explain that lymph nodes are particularly significant as they may be a viral reservoir site, as they are in HIV.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 9d

Electron microscopy showed intact virions after treatment, suggesting the drugs act by inhibiting replication rather than by directly destroying particles.

This means these drugs may need to be taken for an extended period of time to truly reduce viral load.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 9d

✨ New study confirms tenofovir efficacy against SARS-CoV-2! (This includes Truvada!). ✨

In this study, researchers looked at two forms of the anti-HIV antiviral: tenofovir alafenamide (TAF) and tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF).

They found both drugs effective against the virus in-vitro!

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Screenshot of title and author info from this paper: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/17/9/1170

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 10d

Thank you so much to the authors for this important analysis! 🙏

Check out the full paper here: mdpi.com/1999-4915/17...

mdpi.com

Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 10d

They explain that, for many patients, the cure to Long COVID will likely involve developing treatments to clear the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They propose therapies such as:

👉Antivirals to act on the virus directly

👉Immune therapies to help the patient's immune system act more effectively

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 10d

The authors propose that researchers draw from work in other chronic infections, including HIV and Hepatitis C.

These infections are likely similar to Long COVID, as they involve localized reservoirs of replication-component virus.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 10d

👉 The person's immune system can become exhausted trying to clear the virus over time, leading to the exhaustion of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 10d

👉 What this means is that the virus may remain within certain cells in the body and replicate. These cells may then leak viral proteins into the bloodstream, which will then circulate through out the patient's body.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 10d

“The virus reservoirs are characterized by the long-term persistence of pools of infected cells that harbor a replication-competent virus."

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 10d

They write:

"In a proportion of patients with LC, the reservoirs of virus and/or viral RNA (vRNA) may persist and replicate in multiple sites of the body, driving chronic inflammation and overstimulation of immune cells.”

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