Project description:Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to be excellent disease diagnostic or prognostic biomarkers in a wide range of chronic and acute inflammatory and infectious diseases including viral respiratory infection. Crucially, circulating miRNA levels are thought to reflect the state of the diseased tissue. Despite their proven value as mechanism-based clinical stratification indicators, miRNAs have only started being explored in the context of COVID-19. here, we aimed to explore whether integrating miRNA with other clinical and biological measurements would reveal more accurate correlates of COVID-19 severity and outcome, and to identify severity-specific correlations of miRNAs with COVID-19-associated inflammatory mediators, clinical parameters, and otucome.
2021-12-09 | GSE189610 | GEO
Project description:Gut microbiome with COVID-19 severity
Project description:Treatment of severe COVID-19 is currently limited by clinical heterogeneity and incomplete description of specific immune biomarkers. We present here a comprehensive multi-omic blood atlas for patients with varying COVID-19 severity in an integrated comparison with influenza and sepsis patients versus healthy volunteers. We identify immune signatures and correlates of host response. Hallmarks of disease severity involved cells, their inflammatory mediators and networks, including progenitor cells and specific myeloid and lymphocyte subsets, features of the immune repertoire, acute phase response, metabolism and coagulation. Persisting immune activation involving AP-1/p38MAPK was a specific feature of COVID-19. The plasma proteome enabled sub-phenotyping into patient clusters, predictive of severity and outcome. Systems based integrative analyses including tensor and matrix decomposition of all modalities revealed feature groupings linked with severity and specificity compared to influenza and sepsis. Our approach and blood atlas will support future drug development, clinical trial design and personalized medicine approaches for COVID-19.
Project description:Analysis of breast cancer survivors' gut microbiota after lifestyle intervention, during the COVID-19 lockdown, by 16S sequencing of fecal samples.
Project description:Background: Gastrointestinal symptoms in COVID-19 patients suggests that the gut may present a viral target organ. Disease development and severity is dependent on viral interaction with two cell surface human proteins, ACE2 and TMPRSS2, and on antiviral response which may lead to systemic hyperinflammatory syndrome and multiorgan dysfunction Understanding the host response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the pathology of the disease will be greatly enhanced by the development of appropriate animal models. However, the virus does not grow in wild type mice and only induced mild disease in transgenic animals expressing human ACE2. Results: As there are known differences between immune response in laboratory mice and humans, the response of human gut developed as xenografts and host mouse gut following systemic LPS injections as a hyperinflammation model system was evaluated. Gene set enrichment analysis of significantly upregulated human and mouse genes revealed that a number of inflammatory and immune response pathways are commonly regulated in the two species. However, species differences were also observed. The analysis shows that the intestinal immune response to inflammation in humans and mice are generally very similar. However, certain human-specific diseases, such as COVID-19, can only be successfully studied in an experimental model of human tissue, such as the gut xenograft
Project description:Infection with SARS-CoV-2 has highly variable clinical manifestations, ranging from asymptomatic infection through to life-threatening disease. Host whole blood transcriptomics can offer unique insights into the biological processes underpinning infection and disease, as well as severity. We performed whole blood RNA-Sequencing of individuals with varying degrees of COVID-19 severity. We used differential expression analysis and pathway enrichment analysis to explore how the blood transcriptome differs between individuals with mild, moderate, and severe COVID-19, performing pairwise comparisons between groups.
Project description:To reveal genetic determinants of susceptibility to COVID-19 severity in the population and further explore potential immune-related factors, we performed a genome-wide association study on 284 confirmed COVID-19 patients (cases) and 95 healthy individuals (controls). We compared cases and controls of European (EUR) ancestry and African American (AFR) ancestry separately. To further exploring the linkage between HLA and COVID-19 severity, we applied fine-mapping analysis to dissect the HLA association with mild and severe cases.
Project description:We investigated the association between endogenous vitamin D and the severity of COVID-19 as well as the mechanisms of action of vitamin D supplementation. Vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency were associated with increased severity and unfavourable outcome after 28 days. Vitamin D levels were negatively associated with biomarkers of COVID-19 severity. Vitamin D supplementation after challenge of mice with COVID-19 plasma led to reduced levels of TNFα, IL-6, IFNγ and MPO in the lung, as well as down-regulation of pro-inflammatory pathways as derived from RNA-seq experiments. Thus, vitamin D demonstrates a protective effect against severity and unfavorable outcome in COVID-19, possibly through attenuation of tissue-specific hyperinflammation.
Project description:The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started on December 2019 in China and rapidly spread worldwide. Clinical manifestations of Coronavirus-disease 2019 (COVID-19) vary broadly, ranging from asymptomatic infection to acute respiratory failure and death, yet the underlying mechanisms and predictive biomarkers for this high variability are still unknown. Emerging evidence has shown that circulating extracellular vesicles (EVs) and extracellular RNAs (exRNAs) are functionally involved in a number of physiologic and pathologic processes. To test the hypothesis that these extracellular components are a key determinant of severity in COVID-19, we collected 31 serum samples from mild COVID-19 patients at admission in single center. After standard therapy without corticosteroids, 9 of 31 patients became severe COVID-19. We analyzed exRNA profiles from the 31 serums and 10 healthy controls for predicting COVID-19 severity value.