Physicians at the General Hospital of the Central Theater Command compared severely ill patients who received thymosin alpha 1 against those who did not, looking at who survived and how their immune cells recovered.
In the peer-reviewed study of 76 severe COVID-19 patients, those treated with thymosin alpha 1 died at a rate of 11 percent, compared with 30 percent among those who were not, and patients with the lowest CD4 and CD8 T-cell counts benefited the most.
The study was retrospective, not a randomized trial, so sicker or healthier patients could have been steered toward treatment for reasons the analysis could not fully capture. Thymosin alpha 1 had been used for decades for other immune conditions before this outbreak, and the result encouraged further studies, but a retrospective cohort from two hospitals cannot settle whether it works.
Read the original study
Liu et al., Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2020 · doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa630
A decades-old hormone, tested against a new virus.
Source
- Liu, Y., Pan, Y., Hu, Z., Wu, M., Wang, C., Feng, Z., Mao, C., Tan, Y., Liu, Y., Chen, L., Li, M., Wang, G., Yuan, Z., Diao, B., Wu, Y., & Chen, Y. (2020). Thymosin Alpha 1 Reduces the Mortality of Severe Coronavirus Disease 2019 by Restoration of Lymphocytopenia and Reversion of Exhausted T Cells. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 71(16), 2150–2157. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa630