In a disturbing parallel to HIV, the novel coronavirus can cause a depletion of important immune cells.

Dr. Hayday and his colleagues began with the assumption that the patients would generate a profound immune response to the coronavirus. That is why most people recover from infections with few, if any, symptoms.

Now researchers have discovered yet another unpleasant surprise. In many patients hospitalized with the coronavirus, the immune system is threatened by a depletion of certain essential cells; and those who get very sick from the virus could have immune systems that become impaired because they overreact, as happens in sepsis patients. Read more about the COVID-IP contributions to our understanding of this disease here.

Prof Adrian Hayday and Dr Manu Shankar-Hari were invited to advise the House of Lord’s Science and Technology Committee on The Science of COVID-19. Click here to listen to their advice, and its repercussion in this article by The Guardian.

Person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus has triggered a global emergency because of its potential to cause life-threatening Covid-19 disease. By comparison to pauci-symptomatic virus clearance by most individuals, Covid-19 has been proposed to reflect insufficient and/or pathologically exaggerated immune responses. Here we identify a consensus peripheral blood immune signature across 63 hospital-treated Covid-19 patients who were otherwise highly heterogeneous. The core signature conspicuously blended adaptive B cell responses typical of virus infection or vaccination with discrete traits hitherto associated with sepsis, including monocyte and dendritic cell dampening, and hyperactivation and depletion of discrete T cell subsets. This blending of immuno-protective and immuno-pathogenic potentials was exemplified by near-universal CXCL10/IP10 upregulation, as occurred in SARS1 and MERS. Moreover, specific parameters including CXCL10/IP10 over-expression, T cell proliferation, and basophil and plasmacytoid dendritic cell depletion correlated, often prognostically, with Covid-19 progression, collectively composing a resource to inform SARS-CoV-2 pathobiology and risk-based patient stratification.

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This week’s RELAXBACK UK SHOW hosted by Mike Dilke on UK Health Radio has Professor Adrian Hayday explaining the COVID-IP project he is running to understand more about the human response to the Covid-19 disease.

Hear about his work & thoughts on the future of combatting the disease.