IFN-?: A novel therapeutic for treatment of COVID-19

Despite impressive progress over the past 10 months, there is still an urgent need for developing novel therapeutics against the SARS2 virus, the causative agent of Covid19. IFN-λ has already shown promising results in phase 2 clinical trials. To help doctors decide when and how IFN-λ should potentially be used to treat COVID-19 patients, we need more knowledge about the efficacy of IFN-λ and how IFN-λ affects the inflammatory response in the context of SARS2 infection in vivo. The golden Syrian hamster, is susceptible to infection with SARS2 and replicate human disease, thus this is a promising small animal model. We suggest producing recombinant hamster IFN-λ to study its effect against SARS-CoV-2 infection in the hamser model.