A domestic drug created to treat severe lung lesions was also effective against COVID-19. Patients felt an improvement immediately after inhalation of surfactant-BL, obtained by Russian scientists from the lungs of cattle. This is evidenced by the experience of physicians in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tyumen and Syktyvkar.
Surfactant is a liquid lining the pulmonary alveoli from the inside, BL – stands for “bovine lung”. As the head of the research laboratory of anesthesiology and resuscitation of the N.N. VA Almazov Andrey Bautin, it was administered to patients by inhalation, the procedure took 30 minutes twice a day. Two days of treatment were enough for someone, in some cases the drug was administered up to five days.
At the Sechenov University clinic, the chief pulmonologist of the Russian Ministry of Health, Sergei Avdeev, was the first to use the inhalation method of administering the drug instead of the bronchoscopic one, which is more comfortable for patients, and also allows you to catch and reverse the process at earlier stages.
There are about 10 surfactant preparations in the world. All of them, including the Russian one, were originally created to help premature babies who still cannot breathe on their own due to immaturity of the lungs. But only the Russian drug is approved for use in adults. Doctors and scientists have tried to use it for other serious lung diseases, and it worked. Surfactant-BL helped both with swine flu and now with COVID-19.
“Foreign colleagues are going in the same direction as we are. But we were one step ahead, ”Sergei Avdeev told Izvestia.
As a result of the use of the domestic surfactant, it was possible to reduce mortality in the category of severely ill patients from 80% to 14.3%. Upon completion of the study, it is planned to include the use of surfactant-BL in the recommendations of the Ministry of Health for the treatment of patients with coronavirus infection.
Details in the exclusive material from Izvestia:
Easier to lung: Russian drug reduced mortality from COVID-19 by five times