Systems-Level Immunomonitoring from Acute to Recovery Phase of Severe COVID-19

Abstract

Summary Severe disease of SARS-CoV-2 is characterized by vigorous inflammatory responses in the lung, often with a sudden onset after 5–7 days of stable disease. Efforts to modulate this hyperinflammation and the associated acute respiratory distress syndrome rely on the unraveling of the immune cell interactions and cytokines that drive such responses. Given that every patient is captured at different stages of infection, longitudinal monitoring of the immune response is critical and systems-level analyses are required to capture cellular interactions. Here, we report on a systems-level blood immunomonitoring study of 37 adult patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and followed with up to 14 blood samples from acute to recovery phases of the disease. We describe an IFNγ-eosinophil axis activated before lung hyperinflammation and changes in cell-cell co-regulation during different stages of the disease. We also map an immune trajectory during recovery that is shared among patients with severe COVID-19.

Prediction of COVID-19 From Hemogram Results and Age Using Machine Learning

“…Stratification of data according to the predictive value of each of them is another major contribution of the model, given that it may not only guide a careful clinical observation of the parameters identified as most relevant (such as basophil and eosinophil measurements) in the face of suspicion of COVID-19, but also contribute to understanding the pathophysiological process involved in the disease. It has already been described in the literature that eosinophils and basophils can play a central role in the organism's response to SARS-CoV-2 [31,32], and the present study corroborates the relevance of investigating this role. This study presents as one of its main limitations the fact that the developed predictive model -as well as all supervised machine learning models -is totally data-driven, so that, in the face of new data with distinct characteristics patterns, performance may be compromised.…”

Progress and applications of mass cytometry in sketching immune landscapes

“…Researchers have applied CyTOF to explore the immune alterations of patients infected with influenza, 124 HIV, [125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133] Japanese Encephalitis, 134 Ebola, 135 Gammaherpesvirus, 136 chikungunya, 137 hepatitis B, 138,139 as well as the mosquito-borne human viral pathogens, including dengue [140][141][142] and Zika, 143,144 and elucidated the fates of immune cells across viral infections. The use of CyTOF has also supported recent findings in COVID-19 pathogenesis and immune perturbations, 145,146 where the results showed immunosuppression and dysfunction in PBMCs of COVID-19-infected patients. Leng et al investigated the inflammatory responses to SARS-coronavirus-2 (SARS-COV-2) in patients with COVID-19 after treatment with ACE2-mesenchymal stem cells.…”

Is Herd Immunity Against SARS-CoV-2 a Silver Lining?

“…Studies characterizing the SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses suggest that there is marked activation of T cells in acute COVID-19 patients (30)(31)(32). Several studies have provided strong evidence for the importance of SARS-CoV-2 specific CTLs, and T helper cells in mild and moderate patients compared to severe COVID-19 disease (27,28,(31)(32)(33). The effector memory CD8 T cell population is decreased in the severe patients compared to the recovered patients (34)(35)(36).…”