It is hardly a surprise that something like Covid would bring an army of quacks, grifters and pseudoscientists out of the woodworks to try to sell you silly, costly and ineffective treatments for the virus. Some of them even got a boost (deliberately or inadvertently) by confused and bullshit-prone public authorities, like when then-president Trump suggested using internal light to treat COVID-19. Whether Trump knew it or not (he certainly didn’t care), that idea was already being pushed by a company called Aytu Bioscience, which had developed a device called Healight, a catheter with an LED emitting UV-A light. According to Aytu’s CEO Josh Disbrow (who owns the company with his brother Jarrett) and the company’s scientists Mark Pimentel, Ruchi Mathur, Gil Melmed, and Ali Rezaie, working with Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Healight “has the potential to significantly impact the high morbidity and mortality of coronavirus-infected patients and patients infected with other respiratory pathogens.” It doesn’t, a conclusion not affected by the fact that Aytu did have a glitzy promotional video advertising the product, Tweets of which were promptly but temporarily deleted by Twitter along with the company’s Twitter account, after they started getting pushed by a horde of Trump fans and bots eager and/or desperate to edit reality to make it look as if there were (laughable) support for the president’s (dumb) claim. Wingnuts like Breitbart promptly yelled “censorship”. So it goes.
Healight’s claims and the evidence for them are comprehensively assessed here. Now, the developers had, in fact, been working on the Healight device even before Covid, and in an abstract published in the United European Gastroenterology Journal in 2019, they claimed to have evidence that intracolonic UVA light exhibits significant in vitro bactericidal effects in an array of bacteria. Of course, that bactericidal effects doesn’t translate into antiviral effects was a detail quickly brushed over when Covid arrived to present its marketing opportunities, but an even more obvious obstacle elegantly brushed over is the rather important in vitro qualifier: Even if the device actually had impressive in vitro antiviral effects, how would that apply to, say, the type 1 and 2 pneumocytes in the alveoli of the lungs typically affected by Covid and which no device (regardless of whether it was developed for intracolonic application, like Healight, or not) could conceivably reach? Then again, it’s probably a good thing that the device couldn’t actually do what the developers suggested (but were careful not to outright assert) that it could: even if the treatment could actually be delivered, which it can’t, and were able to selectively target virally infected cells and not other cells, which it isn’t (so it would probably kill you if it worked as claimed), it would, if it could kill virally infected cells (which no evidence suggests it can), cause a wave of cell death – rather than killing infected cells over time, as your immune system does – that would severely increase the inflammatory response, something patients already severely affected by Covid might … want to avoid, for obvious reasons.
No, from the point of view of basic anatomy and medicine, the device makes no sense. But then, neither did hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, and lack of sense didn’t halt those products from gaining widespread popularity among those whose epitsemic processes are governed by treating Trump is right as axiomatic. Ivermectin, at least, has genuine uses for other kinds of livestock.
Now, Aytu did in fact ultimately conduct a small clinical study. The study did suggest that Healight, fortunately (and contrary to how Aytu tried to spin the study), didn’t do shit and was accordingly probably safe.
Diagnosis: Yeah, they did conduct a study they shouldn’t have bothered to conduct, and the product seems to have faded from view afterwards as a crank treatment for Covid. Disbrow et al.’s hyping, for commercial purposes, something that couldn’t work still qualifies them all for an entry here and may hopefully help you make safe decisions if you ever encounter their names in the future.
Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence; For Better Science
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