Researchers from the Penn Institute of Immunology discovered three distinct immune responses to the SARS-CoV2 infection that could help predict the trajectory of disease in severe COVID-19 patients and may ultimately inform how to best treat them.
Researchers from the Penn Institute of Immunology discovered three distinct immune responses to the SARS-CoV2 infection that could help predict the trajectory of disease in severe COVID-19 patients and may ultimately inform how to best treat them.
The findings were published in Science.
“For patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19, there isn’t just one way for the immune system to respond. There’s a lot of heterogeneity, which we’ve distilled down into what we’re calling three “immunotypes,” said senior author E. John Wherry, PhD, chair of the department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics and director of the Penn Institute of Immunology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re hopeful we may actually be able to predict, or at least infer, the different immune patterns a patient has based on clinical data. This would allow us to start thinking about enrolling patients to different types of clinical trials investigating treatments.”
The coronavirus triggers different immune responses and symptoms in critically ill patients, but how those two correspond has remained poorly understood, making treatment decisions more difficult.
Read more at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Image: E. John Wherry, PhD, chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics and director of the Penn Institute of Immunology (Credit: University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine)
