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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 (IFNs)—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.
Fish’s colleagues in China connected her with Qiong Zhou, a physician who was at the time treating COVID-19 patients at Wuhan Union Hospital. Zhou was very receptive to the proposal, Fish recalls. As this was an outbreak, there wasn’t any time to optimize an IFN for use against SARS-CoV-2, and Fish and Zhou had to make do with what was available and what had previously been tried ...
