Lactoferrin and COVID-19 - What You Need To Know

- Many high-income countries including Australia have been playing vaccine roulette with our public health. Lockdowns and personal restrictions have been applied while institutions wait for the vaccine effect to kick in.

- I’m not here to question the principle of immunisation that prevents disease transmission and infection which in many areas of application is effective. BUT

- The problem is that the majority narrative for vaccine safety has not adequately looked at complementary strategies like: other treatments, strengthening the health system, non-pharmaceutical prevention, promotion of safe infection control practices and perhaps above all, a healthy lifestyle.

- This talk will look at another complementary strategy and is a follow-on from my OpEd paper and talk on the potential benefits of nicotine against COVID infection.

- A comment on this video suggested I should make a video on some outstanding University of Michigan research just published at the end of August 2021. I was curious and looked into this. WOW…important research and I want to bring you an overview of this and how you can take advantage of this yourselves.

- Despite vaccination there is a need for antiviral compounds that can (i) control local outbreaks, (ii) be used for home-based management and (iii) be used for immunocompromised people for whom vaccination is not suitable and this is required to (iv) slow the spread of variants of concern that may escape vaccine neutralisation.

- Repurposing already FDA-approved drugs is a good place to start to look for drugs that could be deployed as treatments for COVID-19.

- The U. Of Michigan research has developed a way to quantitatively screen actual SARS-CoV-2 infection in human cells and screen for drugs that show in vitro antiviral activity.

- The scientists screened 1425 drugs and found 17 that inhibited coronavirus infection.

- I’m focussing on the top #1 = Lactoferrin (bovine lactoferrin)

- They screened the drugs using African Green monkey kidney cells called Vero E6 as well as several cancer cell lines to see how the virus and drugs worked together. This provided additional insight into the impact of underlying co-morbidity and cancer treatment protocols on infection status.

- We’re going to only focus on coronavirus infection in normal healthy cells in this talk.

- They screened the 1425 FDA-approved compounds at 5 concentrations and looked for antiviral activity.

- The best performing drug was a nutraceutical called Lactoferrin. This is a protein found in colostrum and milk. It was able to block SARS-CoV-2 replication at the entry level.

- It was also found to be effective as a post-entry inhibitor

- They also found that a common asthma inhaler (ipratropium bromide) used in the treatment of asthma and COPD curbed infection and reduced severe bronchial symptoms.

- How does lactoferrin work? It controls the up-regulation and down-regulation of the immune response.

- It decreases the production of IL-6 which is produced by the white-bloc cell macrophages which respond to infection. By reducing the levels of IL-6 this can reduce the cytokine storm effect.

- Lactoferrin is known to be a safe nutritional supplement anyone can buy online from the pharmacy.

- Lactoferrin is also found in cheeses, specially hard cheese like Swiss cheese.

- Lactoferrin is cheap, widely available and according to research can be rapidly deployed for both prophylaxis and management of COVID-19

- Lactoferrin is known to be: anti-microbial, antifungal, antiviral, and anti-parasitic. It possesses an anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory,
and anti-cancer molecule. It is also a fundamental regulator of cellular iron homeostasis.

- In healthy conditions, Lf concentration in blood is rather variable yet always relatively low.

- To use lactoferrin for it’s anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer benefit, higher concentrations are needed to be effective, therefore, exogenous lactoferrin must be administered in vivo to overcome this drawback

- Nutraceuticals like lactoferrin are natural compounds having potent antiviral activity, anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial activity and anti-cancer activity

- A great candidate for combination therapies

Mirabelli, C., Wotring, J., Zhang, C., McCarty, S., Fursmidt, R., Pretto, C., Qiao, Y., Zhang, Y., Frum, T., Kadambi, N., Amin, A., O’Meara, T., Spence, J., Huang, J., Alysandratos, K., Kotton, D., Handelman, S., Wobus, C., Weatherwax, K., Mashour, G., O’Meara, M., Chinnaiyan, A. and Sexton, J., 2021. Morphological cell profiling of SARS-CoV-2 infection identifies drug repurposing candidates for COVID-19. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(36), p.e2105815118.