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French worm blood may save Covid-19 patients' lives
A Paris hospital wants to start testing a substance extracted from worms that may be able to keep dangerously ill Covid-19 patients alive as a last-ditch strategy.
Blood haemoglobin from a certain worm is able to transport 40 times more oxygen from the lungs to the body’s other tissues than ordinary human haemoglobin, according to biotech company founder Franck Zal of Hémaria in Brittany. It is also compatible with all blood types, he said.
It is now hoped that the substance could therefore be given to some seriously ill people who would otherwise have had to go on ecmo (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) devices, which are being used to re-oxygenate patients' blood, especially in cases where even use of a ventilator (machine to keep air going in and out of the lungs) has not been sufficient.
The worm is Arenicola marina, commonly called a lugworm or sandworm, found on Breton beaches, and Connexion wrote about its unusual properties back in 2015. At the time clinical trials were starting on their use in the medical field, with hopes that it could ‘help save millions of lives’.
Then marine biologist Franck Zal, who made the discovery, founded his company to develop therapeutic uses of the worms’ blood. The worm haemoglobin was originally tested for use in organ transplants, where it allows donor organs to be preserved for much longer than usual and helps them start functioning again quickly after being transplanted.
Now it could help those suffering lung conditions due to Covid-19, according to Professor Bernard Cholley, in charge of the intensive care department of the Hôpital Georges Pompidou in Paris, whose colleague Prof Laurent Lantieri previously used the worm blood product in a successful face transplant.
“The problem is that considering the scale of the catastrophe we are not going to be able to put all the patients who need it on ecmo systems,” he told Le Figaro.
He added: “We are going to find ourselves in a very distressing situation and it seems ethical to us to propose a stop-gap solution at a time when we won’t have any more resources for very seriously ill patients.”
He is drawing up guidelines aimed at obtaining rapid permission to test the feasibility of the method on a small number of patients.
