Can proteins predict how ill a patient could become with COVID-19?
New research found that some key proteins in the blood of COVID-19 infected people would reveal how powerful coronavirus disease could be in person.
In this article, we will report the steps taken by scientists of the United Kingdom and Germany in the research on proteins as predictive biomarkers of COVID-19.
Cell Systems journal on COVID-19, the research on key predictive proteins
Predictive proteins found by scientists at Britain’s Francis Crick Institute and Germany’s Charite Universitaetsmedizin Berlin (official website at the end of the article) are 27. The research has been published in the journal Cell Systems on 2nd June.
It reveals that proteins in the blood of COVID-19 infected people can be present at different levels and it depends merely on the severity of the symptoms. This is the main data from which scientists started to realize the research.
Thanks to these proteins, doctors could better understand the level COVID-19 can reach in a specific patient, and this will help in realizing a more precise and new test. Once the potentiality of coronavirus disease has been identified, new targets for the development of eventually efficient treatments can be found.
The potentialities of proteins research: new boundaries on COVID-19 defeat
Coronavirus, as we well know, has been declared a pandemic and has already killed 380,773 people around the world, (you can find the official data on the John Hopkins Map at the end of the article). In the meanwhile, the infections have risen to 6,7 million, which means a very significatively part of the population worldwide.
Dr Christoph Messner, the co-leader of the predictive proteins research and expert in molecular biology at the Crick Institute declared on Reuters that the method used to rapidly test both presence and quantity of proteins in blood plasma at Berlin’s Charite hospital is the mass spectrometry.
They carried out the test on 31 COVID-19 patients, while validation results have been carried out in 17 other patients with coronavirus disease at the same hospital, and in 15 healthy people who acted as controls. Three of the key proteins identified were linked with interleukin IL-6, the protein known for causing inflammation and also known as a marker for severe COVID-19 symptoms.
A very interesting discovery that will surely open new cures and new approach methods on COVID-19 patients worldwide.
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