Chronic Inflammation, Neutrophil Activity, and Autoreactivity Splits Long COVID

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2023 Jul 14

PMID 37452024

Authors

Matthew C Woodruff

Kevin S Bonham

Fabliha A Anam

Tiffany A Walker

Caterina E Faliti

Yusho Ishii

Candice Y Kaminski

Martin C Ruunstrom

Kelly Rose Cooper

Alexander D Truong

Adviteeya N Dixit

Jenny E Han

Richard P Ramonell

Natalie S Haddad

Mark E Rudolph

Srilakshmi Yalavarthi

Viktoria Betin

Ted Natoli

Sherwin Navaz

Scott A Jenks

Yu Zuo

Jason S Knight

Arezou Khosroshahi

F Eun-Hyung Lee

Ignacio Sanz

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

While immunologic correlates of COVID-19 have been widely reported, their associations with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) remain less clear. Due to the wide array of PASC presentations, understanding if specific disease features associate with discrete immune processes and therapeutic opportunities is important. Here we profile patients in the recovery phase of COVID-19 via proteomics screening and machine learning to find signatures of ongoing antiviral B cell development, immune-mediated fibrosis, and markers of cell death in PASC patients but not in controls with uncomplicated recovery. Plasma and immune cell profiling further allow the stratification of PASC into inflammatory and non-inflammatory types. Inflammatory PASC, identifiable through a refined set of 12 blood markers, displays evidence of ongoing neutrophil activity, B cell memory alterations, and building autoreactivity more than a year post COVID-19. Our work thus helps refine PASC categorization to aid in both therapeutic targeting and epidemiological investigation of PASC.

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