GenoMed Inc has launched a world-wide clinical trial against SARS. SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) is only lethal because of the exaggerated host immune response to the novel antigens on the virus's surface. Eventually, the human population will develop a more modulated immune response to the SARS coronavirus, and the virus' lethality will subside, just as it has for the two existing strains of human coronavirus that currently cause the common “cold.”
Until then, the best way to decrease lethality of the virus is to decrease the host's exaggerated immune response, in as safe and specific a way as possible. Steroids are not safe or specific enough. Quarantine, always disruptive socially and economically, is no longer practicable in the modern world. GenoMed has concluded that inhibition of angiotensin II is the ideal method of prophylaxis against the virus's most harmful effect, respiratory failure due to monocyte infiltration of the alveolus, the lung's gas-exchange unit (see GenoMed's previous press releases).
GenoMed is now accepting volunteers in its world-wide clinical trial against SARS. Volunteers will receive background information and an informed consent document. They will be instructed to contact their local physician, whose cooperation is required for participation in the study. Depending on their blood pressure, volunteers will be prescribed either a hydrophobic ACE inhibitor or an angiotensin II receptor blocker (ARB, also called “sartan”) by their physician, and their clinical course will be observed by their physician. If this treatment works as expected, mortality will be reduced among volunteers relative to non-participants. As is customary with all of GenoMed's clinical trials, volunteers who pioneer GenoMed's treatments will receive free use of that treatment for the life of GenoMed's patent.