A One-Minute Blood Test to Monitor Immune Responses in COVID-19 Patients and Predict Clinical Risks of Developing Moderate to Severe Symptoms

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought enormous loss and interruption to human life and the global economy since the first outbreak reported in China between late 2019 to early 2020, and will likely remain a public health threat in the months and years to come. Upon infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, most people will develop no or mild symptoms, however, a small percentage of the population will become severely ill, require hospitalization, intensive care, and some succumb to death. The current knowledge of COVID-19 disease progression with worsening symptom complex implicates the critical importance of identifying patients with high clinical risk compared to those who would be at lower risk for disease control and patient management with better therapeutic output. Currently no clinical test is available that can predict risk factors and immune status change at different severity scales. The immune system plays a critical role in the defense against infectious diseases. Extensive research has found that COVID-19 patients with poor clinical outcomes differ significantly in their immune responses to the virus from those who exhibit milder symptoms. We previously developed a nanoparticle-enabled blood test that can detect the humoral immune status change in animals. In this study, we applied this new test to analyze the immune response in relation to disease severity in COVID-19 patients. From the testing of 153 COVID-19 patient samples and 142 negative controls, we detected statistically significant differences between COVID-19 patients with no or mild symptoms from those who developed moderate to severe symptoms. Mechanistic study suggests that these differences are associated with type 1 versus type 2 immune responses. We conclude that this new rapid test could potentially become a valuable clinical tool for COVID-19 patient risk stratification and management.