COVID-19 tagged posts

A Mount Sinai-led research team has demonstrated that autoimmunity, in which the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues, is responsible for the often-debilitating and confounding symptoms of long COVID in a subset of people.

Findings from the study, published in Cell, could lead to important new approaches to treating patients with long COVID, including already-validated therapies for management of autoimmunity as well as new ways of clinically identifying which patients are most likely to benefit from these therapies.

Autoimmunity emerges as key driver
“We’ve known for some time that long COVID involves not just one but a variety of phenotypes, and now we have validated that autoimmunity is a major contributor to the symptom burden,” says David Putrino, Ph.D...

A research team at Google co-led by Michael Brenner, Catalyst Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Google research scientist, has produced a new artificial intelligence system that can automatically write scientific software programs that surpass the performance of human-written programs. The paper is published in the journal Nature.

How the ERA system came together
The system is called Empirical Research Assistance (ERA), and the project was co-led by Brenner and Shibl Mourad from Google DeepMind. Harvard Ph.D. students Qian-Ze Zhu, Ryan Krueger, and Sarah Martinson contributed as Google student researchers while working in Brenner’s group...

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen have such different responses? It largely comes down to variability in genetics (the genes you inherit) and life experience (your environmental, infection, and vaccination history).

These two influences are imprinted on our cells through small molecular alterations called epigenetic changes, which shape cell identity and function by controlling whether genes are turned “on” or “off.”

Salk Institute researchers are debuting a new epigenetic catalog that reveals the distinct effects of genetic inheritance and life experience on various types of immune cells...

Researchers have uncovered a link between COVID-19 and blood markers linked to faulty proteins in the brain. The analysis, led by researchers at Imperial College London and the UK Dementia Research Institute, found that people who had previously had COVID-19 were more likely to have increased levels of biomarkers linked to faulty amyloid proteins—a known hallmark for Alzheimer’s disease.

On average, the effects were comparable to four years of aging with the greatest effects seen in those hospitalized with severe COVID-19 or with underlying risk factors for dementia such as smoking or high blood pressure.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest that mild or moderate COVID-19 may acceler...