London researchers are zeroing in on COVID-19’s distinct fingerprint in patients’ blood, data that could help doctors personalize drug treatments for the disease.
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London researchers are zeroing in on COVID-19’s distinct fingerprint in patients’ blood, data that could help doctors personalize drug treatments for the disease.
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Scientists at Lawson Health Research Institute, the medical research arm of London’s hospitals, studied proteins in patients’ plasma, uncovering a distinct mix of biomarkers present in severely ill COVID-19 patients.
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Since the proteins are all released from different cells in the body, knowing which ones are present, and at what levels, can help doctors understand exactly how the disease is playing out inside a patient’s body, said Douglas Fraser, a Lawson scientist and a critical care doctor at London Health Sciences Centre.
The research team is working on ways to use the protein-plasma data to help doctors pinpoint and tailor drugs and treatments for each patient, Fraser said.
“This is called personalized or precision medicine, where we can take a blood sample from somebody, look at their complement of proteins and get an idea whether a certain drug will help that person or develop new drugs if they don’t exist,” said Fraser, also a professor at Western University’s Schulich school of medicine and dentistry.
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The method of analyzing the protein signature of disease in blood plasma could also be used to tailor treatments for sepsis and long COVID, a condition where the disease’s symptoms persists long after the patient’s initial COVID-19 illness is over.
“What’s beautiful about this is we can do this with any disease,” Fraser said.
“Or, if someone has a disease and they’re about to get a new therapy, we can take a blood sample before the therapy and afterwards and start to understand how the body reacts to it and see if there might be an add-on treatment that might be helpful.”
In the most recent study, blood samples were taken from 30 patients at London Health Sciences Centre in three different categories. One group was patients in critical care with COVID-19, another group had patients with severe infections that had tested negative for COVID-19 and the third category was a healthy control group, for comparison.
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Blood samples were drawn on the day the patients were admitted to critical care, and after three, seven and 10 days in the hospital.
The team identified more than 1,000 proteins in the blood samples of the patients and did an in-depth analysis of the giant mound of data using artificial intelligence and conventional statistical methods, Fraser said.
“We can enter all these proteins and how they are changing into these pipelines and it can tell us what’s going on — what cells in the body are activated and the biological pathways involved,” he said.
“With that information we can go to drug databases . . . take the cell types involved and the signalling pathways and see if there are existing drugs that would modulate or alter that pathway to help someone’s outcome.”
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The researchers were able to track how the protein signature of COVID-19 in patients’ blood plasma changed over time, and what protein-making cells were most active at different phases of the illness.
“This study has allowed us to understand the progression of the disease processes in very sick patients, providing us clues on the body’s immune system and other systems that were reacting to the severe disease,” Victor Han, director of Children’s Health Research Institute, a division of Lawson, said in a news release.
“We hope that this knowledge will allow us to identify the patients who will become severely ill, and develop new therapies to counteract the changes occurring within their bodies.”
The latest paper is published in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
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London researchers pinpoint blood data that may improve COVID treatment - The London Free Press
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