Heightened Innate Immune Responses in the Respiratory Tract of COVID-19 Patients

By Zhuo Zhou, L. Ren, Li Zhang, Jiaxin Zhong, Yan Xiao, Zhilong Jia, Li Guo, Jing Yang, Chun Wang, Shuai Jiang and 16 more. Cell Host and Microbe, 2020

914 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The outbreaks of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection have posed a severe threat to global public health. It is unclear how the human immune system responds to this infection. Here, we used metatranscriptomic sequencing to profile immune signatures in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of eight COVID-19 cases. The expression of proinflammatory genes, especially chemokines, was markedly elevated in COVID-19 cases compared to community-acquired pneumonia patients and healthy controls, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 infection causes hypercytokinemia. Compared to SARS-CoV, which is thought to induce inadequate interferon (IFN) responses, SARS-CoV-2 robustly triggered expression of numerous IFN-stimulated genes (ISGs). These ISGs exhibit immunopathogenic potential, with overrepresentation of genes involved in inflammation. The transcriptome data was also used to estimate immune cell populations, revealing increases in activated dendritic cells and neutrophils. Collectively, these host responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection could further our understanding of disease pathogenesis and point toward antiviral strategies.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60b5d170d73f2be572b7b34b8b6cad93fede624a

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In Epidemiology

1. A. Iwasaki
2. R. Medzhitov
3. Shizuo Akira
4. Taro Kawai
5. Kevin J. Tracey

In Infectious Diseases

1. R. Medzhitov

Citations in the corpus

• Long COVID or post-COVID-19 syndrome: putative pathophysiology, risk factors, and treatments (2021, background): “Indeed, SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to trigger inflammatory mast cell responses alongside other immune cells in COVID-19 patients [192,193].”
• Longitudinal analyses reveal immunological misfiring in severe COVID-19 (2020, methodology): “For all patients, days from symptom onset were estimated according to the following scheme: (1) highest priority was given explicit onset dates provided by patients; (2) next highest priority was given to the earliest reported symptom by a patient, and (3) in the absence of direct information regard”