Long Covid trials aim to clear lingering virus —and help patients in need

One Monday morning last September, Shelley Hayden pulled into a parking spot in an underground garage at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). She switched off the ignition, pushed the red record button on her cellphone, and gazed into the camera. “The time has come,” said Hayden, long dark-blond hair framing her blue eyes. “Here we are, I’m actually getting to do something.” More than 3 years earlier, in the summer of 2020, Hayden had come down with COVID-19 while visiting family in Colorado. Since then she’s been plagued by the disease’s cruel sequel, Long Covid, whose symptoms include overwhelming fatigue, difficulty thinking, shortness of breath, gastrointestinal complications, and headaches. There are no proven treatments. Speaking earlier this year from her parents’ house where she now lives, her Labrador retriever lying nearby, Hayden described nights when she thought she wouldn’t make it to morning. “I would text my best friend passwords before I went to bed,” she says. “I was so sure I was dying.” But that September day at UCSF, Hayden logged her optimism for posterity. Minutes later she walked through the building’s automatic doors to an infusion room with a panoramic view, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and Pacific Ocean. There, she became Patient No. 3 in a monoclonal antibody study, and part of a small but growing community: people with Long Covid enrolling in rigorously designed clinical trials of potentia...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news