Professor Ross Mc Manus

Summary

SARS-COV2 infection is threatening acute hospital and intensive care unit capacity globally. There is an acute need for a prognostic test which will identify patients at either high or low risk of developing a severe response to COVID-19 infection. Such a test, by identifying whether the immune response is insufficient or excessive, could also help inform therapeutic options during disease progression, We have a long track-record of investigating immune parameters in hospitalised patients with infection and sepsis. We have previously identified a 6 cytokine signature upon admission that discriminates between patients who will experience an uneventful recovery compared to those who develop sepsis. We have also identified IL-7 as an indicator of severe disease in children with viral bronchiolitis and more recently described characteristic immune deficits in severe patients notably dominated by reduced effector T-lymphocyte differentiation. These findings indicate that defects in the immune response in the early stages of disease are strongly correlated with poor outcome. We propose to investigate patients with mild infection, severe infection and controls using a state-of-the art single cell transcriptomic analysis platform. This will allow us to identify a unique Immune response signature from different cells in patients that have mild vs those with a severe response to infection. This signature will be rapidly transformed into a simple flow cytometry or PCR based prognostic assay that can be run in hospital laboratories. This simple assay will identify individuals likely to develop a severe reaction to SARS-COV2 infection requiring ICU admission, but more importantly, will identify infected individuals that can be safely sent home to self- isolate freeing up critical hospital resources, decreasing costs and reducing the risk of viral spread. Importantly, it will also identify immune deficits in patients, informing evidence-based therapeutic options. This project can deliver a prognostic assay within 6 months.

Funding Agency

HRB

Programme

COV19

Project Type

Translational research

Person Months

12

Summary

Funding Agency

EU

Programme

Erasmus+

Project Type

Strategic Partnership