Metabolic Changes in Plasma and Immune Cells Linked to COVID-19 Severity

The metabolic changes that regulate how the immune and plasma cells react to COVID-19 severity have been uncovered by researchers.

The metabolic changes that regulate how the immune and plasma cells react to COVID-19 severity have been uncovered by researchers. These changes could help predict patient survival. The findings were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The researchers collected 374 blood samples – two draws per patient during the first week after being diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infection – and analyzed their plasma and single immune cells. The analysis included 1,387 genes involved in metabolic pathways and 1,050 plasma metabolites.

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‘COVID-19 patients have differing immune responses that lead to disease outcomes ranging from asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection to death.’

In plasma samples, the team found that increased COVID-19 severity is associated with metabolite alterations, suggesting increased immune-related activity. Furthermore, through single-cell sequencing, researchers found that each major immune cell type has a distinct metabolic signature.

“We have found metabolic reprogramming that is highly specific to individual immune cell classes (e.g. “killer” CD8+ T cells, “helper” CD4+ T cells, antibody-secreting B cells, etc.) and even cell subtypes, and the complex metabolic reprogramming of the immune system is associated with the plasma global metabolome and are predictive of disease severity and even patient death,” said co-first and co-corresponding author Dr. Yapeng Su, a research scientist at Institute for Systems Biology.

“Such deep and clinically relevant insights on sophisticated metabolic reprogramming within our heterogeneous immune systems are otherwise impossible to gain without advanced single-cell multi-omic analysis.”

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The research was conducted by scientists from ISB, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Stanford University, Swedish Medical Center St. John’s Cancer Institute at Saint John’s Health Center, the University of Washington, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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Funding for this project comes from Merck and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the Wilke Family Foundation, the MJ Murdock Charitable Trust, the Swedish Medical Center Foundation, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Gilead, Amazon Web Services, and the National Institutes of Health.

Source-Eurekalert

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