Even worse, that type of chronic inflammation might cause premature death. Or cancer. Or other disease states.
> “In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that if we could produce this type of light immune activation in other people, we could protect them from just about any virus,” Bogunovic says.
This sounds terrifying. There's a reason our bodies do not regulate like this.
>Bogunovic’s therapy is designed to mimic what happens in people with ISG15 deficiency, but only for a short time.
Given the choice between 2 weeks of a moderate COVID infection (fever but no hospitalization), and 2 weeks of this therapy, I would guess that the moderate COVID infection gets you at least 10x the inflammation.
It also sounds like an episode of some televised sci-fi series where someone was exhibiting remarkable immunity to all sorts of diseases (including some nasty ones deliberately added for testing); but it turned out that this was no super-cure but instead the limited natural resources of the immune system being used up all at once, leading to a horrific death when they ran out.
Sounds very Outer Limits-esque, but I don't recall that specific episode. It's certainly at least an easy interpolation from many Outer Limits episodes, though.
On the other hand, let's aim for the juiced up immune systems portrayed in one of the Star Trek series. It gets so powerful it can reject acquaintances.
I think it was one of the offshoots like Next Generation that had a visit to some research station where all the scientists were dead or dying of premature aging. It was the immune systems of some (bioengineered?) children that were killing them.
> “In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that if we could produce this type of light immune activation in other people, we could protect them from just about any virus,” Bogunovic says.
This sounds terrifying. There's a reason our bodies do not regulate like this.