Since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in 2019, hundreds of millions of people around the world have been infected. While the majority fully recovers, a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations has been reported, including life-threatening disease in viral and post-viral phases and long-term post-COVID-19 syndromes.

The post-viral stages of the disease are often associated with a strong, immune-system-mediated, cytokine storm, with a fraction of patients experiencing long-term post-recovery symptoms, known as long COVID.

These clinical signs during post-viral stages vary from mild to more severe, involving long-term tissue damage such as lung fibrosis.

The findings presented here show that soluble low-molecular-weight heparin analogs such as enoxaparin, a widely used anticoagulant, dissociate SARS-CoV-2 NP and rescue uninfected cells from complement-mediated attack. This raises the possibility that similar strategies may be applied to alleviate exacerbated immune pathologies associated with additional viral diseases and relieve certain autoimmune damaging conditions such as Sjögren, lupus, and MIS diseases.