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

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 · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 7d

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 · 7d

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 · 7d

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 · 7d

✨ 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 · 8d

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 · 8d

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 · 8d

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 · 8d

👉 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 · 8d

👉 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 · 8d

“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 · 8d

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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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 8d

🚨Fascinating new analysis from @ucirvine.bsky.social researchers on the possible role of SARS-CoV-2 persistence in Long COVID:

The authors outline several mechanisms by which the virus could remain in the human body and cause disease.

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Figure 1 from the paper:

Caption says: Five major mechanisms by which the virus, vRNA, and viral antigens may cause multiple and different pathologies in Long COVID patients. (A) A causative factor in a large subset of patients with LC is that reservoirs of virus, viral RNA (vRNA), and/or fragments may persist in multiple sites of the body. (B) This causes chronic inflammation, overstimulating innate and adaptive immune cells, and providing continuous viral antigenic stimuli to (C) exhausted CD4+ and CD8+ T cells [31,33,34,35,36]. This may result in damage to major organ systems, leading to neurological, cardiovascular, pulmonary, muscular, and psychiatric pathologies [43,44]. (D–F) Other possible causative factors of LC include metabolic disturbances, immune dysbiosis, micro-clotting, endothelial dysfunction [38,43,45,46,47], and the reactivation of HSV-1, HSV-2, EBV, CMV, and HHV-6 [48,49]. This Figure is created using BioRender.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 15d

Perhaps Long COVID is not dependent on ONLY viral persistence, but on the person's individual response to it.

Additionally, we don't yet know how the ongoing presence of SARS-CoV-2 will affect healthy controls down the road.

Definitely food for thought!

Thanks to this team for their work! 🙏

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 15d

The authors that these findings demonstrate that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection is NOT the underlying cause of Long COVID - because the rates between the two groups were similar.

However, it's worth asking more about what these findings mean...

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 15d

🚨 New UNLOCK LC Consortium paper finds circulating nucleocapsid protein in Long COVID Patients AND Healthy Controls

👉Researchers found circulating nucleocapsid protein in 10/39 Long COVID patients, and 6/21 healthy controls.

#longcovid #medsky #pedsky

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www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

controls.ing

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 20d

All in all, today was fantastic news for Long COVID patients.

We're grateful to all who attended the meeting, and can't wait to see where the future leads! 🙏

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 20d

Huge news is that ARPA-H will now be getting involved in the fight against Long COVID.

ARPA-H is a different governmental organization with an emphasis on finding answers *quickly* - it's a completely different way of doing things than the slower, traditional model the NIH has been following.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 20d

Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield emphatically stated that the evidence for SARS-CoV-2 persistence was undeniable, and that while a few years ago he may have been skeptical, he is now convinced it's a huge problem.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 20d

She explained that investment into antivirals is necessary to prevent future pandemics.

Dr. Iwasaki also explained that Long COVID research also informs our knowledge of other post-acute infectious syndromes, such as chronic #lyme and Epstein Barr virus.

She speaks at 2:04:00 in the video!

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 20d

Dr. Iwasaki emphasized that viral persistence treatments can actually get at the root cause of Long COVID- in contrast to many of the symptomatic treatments the NIH has initially trialed.

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Long COVID Labs @longcovidlabs.bsky.social · 20d

@virusesimmunity.bsky.social explained that for many patients, Long COVID is seems to be caused by:

".... a fundamental inability to clear the virus at the acute phase, which then leads to persistence of the virus or the viral antigen or the RNA..."

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