Wednesday, February 10, 2021 NIAID Research Illuminates Individual Immune Responses to COVID-19 Overview of key findings from the NIAID researchers' analyses, including an illustration of the late time window in which individual immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection diverge. Credit: NIAID Immune responses to infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, differ among individuals. To link this immune response variation to disease severity and outcome over time, NIAID scientists used sophisticated experimental and computational techniques to assess gene and protein expression as well as immune receptor repertoire in individual cells from people with COVID-19. Their analyses uncovered a time juncture more than two weeks after symptom onset during which some people experience a "second wave" of immune responses that is associated with more severe disease and death. Specifically, they found that inflammatory and metabolic gene changes in natural killer (NK) cells linked to high levels of the cell-signaling protein IL-15 were connected with greater disease severity. The findings, published today in Cell, may aid clinical monitoring of COVID-19 patients and help guide personalized treatments. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases  |  National Institutes of Health Update your subscriptions, modify your password or e-mail address, or stop subscriptions at any time on your Subscriber Preferences Page. You will need to use your e-mail address to log in. If you have questions or problems with the subscription service, please contact Subscriber Help. This service is provided to you at no charge by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).                             This email was sent to myhcistech.healthnews360@blogger.com using GovDelivery Communications Cloud on behalf of: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases · 5601 Fishers Lane · Bethesda, MD 20892 · 1-866-284-4107