New biotech company from Bristol uses linoleic acid as pan coronavirus antiviral | Hacker News Reader

New biotech company from Bristol uses linoleic acid as pan coronavirus antiviral

halo-therapeutics.com

33 pointsthro138 comments

To me, this sounds like "snake oil."

Lipid pneumonia is a thing. Inhaling oils into your lungs is generally a bad idea.

At what dosage does that become a problem? Vaping liquids are glycol and glycerine based and while they are probably not particularly healthy compared to not vaping at all they don’t seem to cause lipid pneumonia that often.

The internet tells me glycerin is a component of oils but is, itself, miscible with water. The internet further tells me this means that, unlike oil, it mixes just fine with water. (People who know more chemistry than me: Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) The problem with oils is it blocks air flow into the lungs, kind of like how you oil a leather canteen so it doesn't leak.

I've had a nebulizer. They are hard as all hell to keep adequately clean to be safe to use and some people have made themselves sick using an inadequately clean nebulizer. (This is similar to vaping.)

I've known a couple of people who had lipid pneumonia, one of whom had a serious respiratory condition, was hanging out on email lists where we were discussing home remedies and they got the bright idea that breathing in some oil or other would be totes a good idea for some damn reason. Yeah, that wasn't such a hot idea after all.

The question here is does this lipid actually cause pneumonia and if so at what dosage, if it can be relatively easily metabolized or otherwise cleared from the tissue it might not be an issue in the first place.

Yes nebulizers are hard to keep clean but that’s because they are essentially a petri dish and people who use them already have compromised lungs and or immune system. I don’t think people who vape keep their ecigs especially clean and at scale it doesn’t seem to cause too many issues.

I can see a lot of reasons why this might not end up being effective but jumping to pneumonia is a bit of a stretch tbh.

If this lipid isn’t toxic at a medically effective dosage you can probably have a hygienic delivery mechanism like an inhaler instead of a nebulizer.

I don't vape. My knowledge of oil chemistry is on shaky ground and I've already deleted one comment because I blurted something out half remembered and was like "Wait. That's not actually correct."

What I'm telling you is that glycerin is not a lipid, though it appears to be a building block of lipids. So glycerin being a basis for vaped products is irrelevant.

My general understanding is any amount of oils going into the lungs is a bad idea. This is not about medicinal dosage. This is about mechanically blocking lung function.

Oils and fat have one glycerin combined with 3 fatty acids, for example linoleic acid or other. The exact acids depends on the animal/plant that produce it and are very important to determine if it is solid or liquid, the melting temperature, if it's stable or get rancid, ...

You can separate them and get glycerin again, and the fatty acid alone. You usually get a mix of fatty acids and it's essentially soap. (The properties of the depends on the mix of fatty acids that depends on the origin of the oil/fat you are using.)

So this is more like inhaling soap than inhaling oil. (Soap usually has also Potassium mixed with the fatty acids, so it's not exactly equal.) (And the mix of fatty acids makes each soap different...)

Anyway. Is this safe? Is this a good idea? I'm skeptic, but let's wait until the clinical trials have finished.

Yeah, I'm not really trying to bust them. More like trying to suggest "Don't try inhaling oils at home as a DIY thing. It has a track record of landing people in the ER."

I'm not a doctor, etc. I just have been discussing health stuff online a lot of years and I've seen people leap to conclusions that did not end well.

> Don't try inhaling oils at home as a DIY thing.

Completely agree. Also, an additional problem is that sometimes people try substitutions like using linseed oil instead of linoleic acid, and it can be bad or very bad. (In particular if the linseed oil is for painting and have additives.)

> I'm not really trying to bust them.

I'm not so kind, and as I said before I'm very skeptic. But I can't find any theoretical reason to be sure this will not work or that this will work, so let's wait for the clinical trial results in case there is an unexpected surprise.

(For example, with Chlorine Dioxide, it's almost impossible that it is useful because we know how it react.)

I'm skeptical as well. I think we are on the same page here.

Guys Im a co-founder of the company Halo-Tx. Our work is based on a publication in Science Magazine. This is highest level science not "snake oil" stuff. This is not about inhaling vegetable oils: this is free fatty acids which are components of dietary oils, but also central elements of our metabolism and bodily function. Free fatty acids have decades of use as inactive ingredients in drug products, inhaled, nasal, and oral administration route. Dosing and safety parameters are not only known, they have been used by million of people in different drugs that are presently marketed. What we discovered is that the virus hijacks the body's natural free fatty acid pools to drive (turbocharge) its own replication, and a side effect is nasty inflammation because free fatty acids are the major inflammatory signaling precursors in the body (e.g. aspirin, and dexamethasone cools them off). P.S. dexamethasone is the only anti-inflammitory shown to have any effect in really sick COVID patients.

Do you have any studies in the works to discover efficacy?

I'm also a little leery about an oil-based nasal spray. And not convinced that anything administered in this way would reach even the majority of the virus in your body. At best it seems like it might reduce your viral load.

I'll look around your site more, but I'm seeing a lot of talk and not any hard data.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6517/725

Thanks for the link, but it doesn't address any of my concerns about whether it would be safe and effective when administered as a nasal spray. I was curious if you had any studies in the works to identify efficacy in animal models.

I hate to bring out the tired old argument, but a flamethrower will kill cancer in a petri dish. Doesn't make it an effective therapy.

How good is your solution at stopping the initial virus binding [?1], and how good at stopping (re)infecting - in the way that virus produced from some cell of my body could be deactivated before it reaches some other cell of my [?2] or someone else [?3] body, or by other means [?4] ?

That's safflower oil.

But from another comment, lipid pneumonia is a thing, so I probably shouldn't start spraying safflower oil in my nasal cavity and pharynx...

I pan-fry sausages, which aerosolizes fats. I've been doing it for years and I don't think it's caused pneumonia... I'd reason that our lungs can tolerate a small dose of lipids per day, but a spritz up the nose doesn't sound great to me

Its not actually. That is the triglyceride. LA is the free fatty acid of the plant oil.

Is there anything dangerous about linoleic acid? I.e. is there harm in trying it, even if it turns out it doesn't work? Just curious how a trial like this would go. If it's essentially benign, it seems like people could just use it, if it had some potential side effects then I guess it would be more complicated.

It's seed oil.

They are talking about using it in inhalers, I don't know that I would be eager to try inhaling oil from some improvised setup.

Adding some grapeseed oil or whatever to your diet wouldn't have any side effects.

Not sure how this would be implemented. Lipid pneumonia is a thing. So is vaping-associated pulmonary injury (VAPI), the lung disease allegedly caused by vaping back in 2019 which was traced to Vitamin E acetate.

Its not. Its the free fatty acid of the triglyceride. apples and organges.

I wouldn't recommend it:

https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e8707

(Also worth nothing Americans are already eating very high (and increasing) amounts of linoleic acid, and we have been hit pretty hard by the coronavirus.)

(Should also note that linoleic acid is in tons of food; eating some is totally natural and healthy. "The dose makes the poison," as the old saying goes.)

I belive that's insightful comment about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21073302

(from discussion "Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity").

Route of administration is nasal spray or pulmonary spray. THe doses to be administer have been used in prior drugs for these administration routes as INACTIVE INGREDIENTS. its not a safety issue. For more information https://halo-therapeutics.com/ and https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6517/725

First well-educated guess there may be something to look for - March 2020 (?):

"Can Bioactive Lipids Inactivate Coronavirus (COVID-19)?"

https://europepmc.org/article/med/32229155

(not yet about inhibiting binding)

Coronaviruses are extremely easy to inactivate them. From memory, they are inactivated by soap, bleach, ethanol, sunlight (maybe), various surfactant-like disinfectants, and probably many other things. Admittedly, injecting fatty acids into one’s blood doesn’t seem quite as unwise as injecting bleach, but it still doesn’t sound like a great idea.

> sunlight (maybe)

Sunlight Neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 8x Faster Than Initially Assumed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698047 .

Other things to consider - for example lower cholesterol, omega ratios, beetroots? ;) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843768 - "The metabolic fingerprint of Covid-19 severity" (it's a gem).

edit: this research is more about inactivating by inhibiting the virus, before it enters the cell, using something that doesn't kill (virus is not alive anyway), another example is hrsACE2 which as well inhibits binding, discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008048 .

So obviously you should put a tanning lamp inside your body. Problem solved.

Oh god, photon therapy just evolved. We're going to insert fiber optic cables into every major artery and give your blood a suntan. Absolutely nothing could go wrong.

Beetroots (may help with O2 saturation _when_ infected) are late and the UV lamp will be better inside of air filter outside of your body to not let the infection happen in the first place - light waves doesn't pass through the human body anyway - but other waves can.

There it is: the resonance frequency of the virus ( https://www.livescience.com/7472-kill-viruses-shake-death.ht... , 2008) - icosahedral satellite tobacco necrosis virus of diameter of 18.4 nm resonates strongly around 60 GHz, according to Wikipedia the size of coronavirus is highly variable with average diameters of 80 to 120 nm, size of spikes 25 nm - so there may be no specific frequency of.. microwaves disintegrating the coronavirus by resonance, but it could be maybe one resonating with the spikes ? (UV light damages the DNA/RNA both of the virus and cell).

Nobody is suggesting "injecting" anything. No oral route either. Nasal and pulmonary sprays.

Publication mentioned:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6517/725

They are currently fundraising for clinical trials.

.. Covid19 designer drugs..

Druggable pocket in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24567458, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMaKFcpV5wg

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...

  The linoleic acid-binding pocket in SARS-COV-2 will make an attractive target for possible designer drugs..

hrsACE2 as well inhibits binding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008048 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMaKFcpV5wg

  APN001 is a hrsACE2 designed by Apeiron Biologics to imitate the human enzyme ACE2. 
  hrsACE2 at tissue sites can effectively compete with the endogenous ACE2 and limits SARS-CoV-2 entrance into the host cells

How's the trial going?

If it works, LA would be a nice cheap prophylactic.

They apparently haven't started a trial yet.

https://globalbiodefense.com/2021/04/15/university-of-bristo...

Cannabis oil from vaporized loose leaf instead.

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