Researchers ID protein “signature” in severe COVID-19 cases.
Harvard Medical School researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have identified the protein “signature” of severe COVID-19, which they describe in a new study published in Cell Reports Medicine.
“We were interested in asking whether we could identify mechanisms that might be contributing to death in COVID-19,” said Marcia Goldberg, HMS professor of medicine at Mass General and senior author of the study.
Coronavirus illustration by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“In other words, why do some patients die from this disease, while others—who appear to be just as ill—survive?” she said.
In March 2020, when the first patients with symptoms of COVID-19 began arriving at Mass General’s emergency department, her colleague Michael Filbin, HMS assistant professor of emergency medicine at Mass General and lead author of the study, contacted her.
Filbin and Goldberg had earlier begun collaborating with Nir Hacohen, HMS professor of medicine at Mass General, to develop methods for studying human immune responses to infections, which they had applied to bacterial sepsis.
The three agreed to tackle this new problem with the goal of understanding how the human immune system responds to SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19.
To undertake the study, the Mass General team used proteomics, the analysis of the entire protein composition, or proteome, of a cell, tissue, or organism.
In this case, proteomic analysis was used to study blood specimens taken from patients arriving at the hospital’s ED with respiratory symptoms consistent with COVID-19.
Collecting these specimens required a large team of collaborators from many departments, who worked overtime for five weeks to collect blood samples from 306 patients who tested positive for COVID-19, as well as from 78 patients with similar symptoms who tested negative.
Next, Arnav Mehta, HMS clinical fellow in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was brought on board to oversee the interpretation of the complex data produced by the proteomic analysis. Mehta is also a researcher in Hacohen’s lab, and the two had long been interested in using proteomic analysis of blood as an alternative to biopsies.
“We have been asking what can we learn about what’s happening in the body just by looking at protein signatures in the blood,” said Mehta.
The study found that most patients with COVID-19 have a consistent protein signature, regardless of disease severity. As would be expected, their bodies mount an immune response by producing proteins that attack the virus.
“But we also found a small subset of patients with the disease who did not demonstrate the pro-inflammatory response that is typical of other COVID-19 patients,” said Filbin. Yet these patients were just as likely as others to have severe disease.
Filbin noted that patients in this subset tended to be older people with chronic diseases, who likely had weakened immune systems.
The next step was to compare the protein signatures of patients with severe disease, defined as those who had required intubation or had died within 28 days of hospital admission, with patients with less severe cases of COVID-19.
The comparison allowed the researchers to identify more than 250 “severity associated” proteins.
It was important to note, said Mehta, that blood was drawn from patients three times: on enrollment, then three and seven days later.
“That allowed us to look at the trajectory of the disease,” said Mehta.
Among other revelations, this showed that the most prevalent severity-associated protein, a pro-inflammatory protein called interleukin-6, or IL-6, rose steadily in patients who died, while it rose and then dropped in those with severe disease who survived.
Early attempts by other groups to treat patients with COVID-19 who experienced acute respiratory distress with drugs that block IL-6 were disappointing, though more recent studies show promise in combining these medications with the steroid dexamethasone.
However, Hacohen noted that many of the other severity-associated proteins the analysis identified are likely important for understanding why only a portion of people with COVID-19 develop severe disease.
Learning how the disease affects the lungs, heart, and other organs is essential, he said, and proteomic analysis of the blood is a relatively easy method for getting that information.
“You can ask which of the many thousands of proteins circulating in your blood are associated with the actual outcome,” said Hacohen, “and whether there is a set of proteins that tell us something.”
Goldberg believes that the proteomic signatures identified in this study will do just that.
“They are highly likely to be useful in figuring out some of the underlying mechanisms that lead to severe disease and death in COVID-19,” said Goldberg, noting her gratitude to the patients involved in the study.
Their samples are already being used to study other aspects of COVID-19, such as identifying the qualities of antibodies that patients form against the virus.
Source: HMS