Findings published in 2021 in the Lancet’s EBioMedicine have shown the presence of W-ENV on lymphocytes of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and the correlation of the level of expression with disease severity; furthermore, recent data showed that SARS-CoV-2 is able to induce in vitro W-ENV expression in human blood cells of approximately 20% of healthy volunteers. The known pro-inflammatory properties of W-ENV are thought to act as an “accelerant” of the activation of the innate immune system, fueling the severity of COVID-19 evolution and impacting long term recovery.

Expression of the pathogenic W-ENV protein triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 infection, continuing long after the acute phase has been resolved, is suspected to have a major role in the persistence of inflammation in many long-COVID patients.

Large-scale academic studies indicate that as many as 10% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 do not fully recover and/or develop new symptoms, with a high proportion of neurological and/or psychiatric disorders. A January 2023 Nature Reviews Microbiology publication estimated that at least 65 million people suffer from long COVID.

GeNeuro is at the forefront in tackling this problem, with the first personalized medicine clinical trial, called GNC-501, against Post-COVID, assessing temelimab as a Disease Modifying Therapy in Post-COVID patients and who are positive for the presence of the pathogenic W-ENV protein in their blood..

The recruitment of the GNC-501 trial has already demonstrated that the expression of the pathogenic W-ENV protein, triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 infection, may continue long after the acute phase has been resolved. Over one third of the patients presenting post-COVID syndromes who were screened were positive to the presence of W-ENV in their blood. W-ENV is suspected to have a major role in the persistence of inflammation and in the neurological symptoms affecting these patients, and temelimab is a highly specific neutralizing anti-W-ENV-antibody. GeNeuro’s precision medicine approach allows to identify, within the millions of patients affected by post-COVID, those for whom the treatment may be relevant.