Study explores therapeutic potential of exploiting autophagy cascade against COVID-19
Autophagy is [a] cellular catabolic mechanism that arbitrates the degradation of undesirable protein aggregates and damaged organelles and recycles the degraded components.
Under normal conditions, autophagy will fight against infections and viruses by breaking down and recycling unwanted proteins (as seen in the top image). It has been speculated that COVID-19 and the previous Sars virus hijack the autophagy mechanism (image below).
In addition, based on the current knowledge available (Gassen et al., 2020; Singh et al., 2020), we strongly believe autophagy inducers (such as Sirolimus, Everolimus, Trehalose and Valinomycin) hold great promise as an alternative therapeutic strategy.
Here is another way to induce autophagy without taking any special drugs.