So I was not sure how and where to actually posts this but I guess the Forum is a good place. This question or hopefully this discussion is maybe a little different to the usual content.
As a Molecular Biologist who turned to Bioinformatics, I asked myself what many have, how can I help in the current crisis ? I am not virologist, nor an expert in infection. I have however worked quite a bit on miRNA and RNAi and have to come to wonder why this has not yet been put forward as a treatment option.
RNAi design is standard procedure and almost as well known as primer design at this point and we should be able to come up with a few RNAis against COVID19's ssRNA pretty fast.
The history of antisense treatments is relatively short but there are some successes. Even recently there was a paper on using antisense oligos against Huntington's.
As far as I understand the problem with antisense treatments, concentration at the desired location and delivery of oligos is usually a problem, but in this case this should not be one at all.
There are many ways to deliver aerosol into the lung of patient. RNAis could be designed to be exclusive for the Virus with a few blast searches and the small molecules should be stable enough to survive the aerosolisation process.
One could package the RNAis into vesicles which would help them to fuse or enter the cells delivering the antisense oligos and let nature do the rest.
I hope this will spark some discussion and maybe somebody points out why this would not work and is not feasible. If somebody wants to actually try this in-vitro I would very much like to know the outcome.
I have no access to a lab equipped for such experiments so see this post also as a way of putting the idea out there in the hope that somebody smarter shots it down or maybe gets inspired.
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Consider posting this over at biology stackexchange. This is not related to bioinformatics directly (unless you want to focus on designing the actual oligo's by analysis of sequence).
Even if you provide the RNAs as aerosol it still need to enter the cell and the cell does not do that voluntarily. Also vesicles are not a jack-of-all-trades. They must be specific enough to reliably trigger cellular uptake without triggering dangerous immune responses. "Let nature do the rest" is quite an oversimplification. Your ideas are good in principle but these kinds of delivery methods are under research for years and afaik few have ever made it to the clinics, leave alone approved and effective treatment options. I suggest you go into the drug delivery literature. I guess this is mainly a delivery and not an RNAi design problem.
Even allowing for extra kindness and sensitivity to the relevance of this topic to our daily lives, I don't see how it is related to bioinformatics. In my opinion this topic should be closed.