According to this article from the Karolinska Institutet, its researchers believe IL-26(Interleukin-26) is a possible biomarker for acute COVID-19 because of its correlation with patients with acute COVID-19 infection in conjunction with its correlation with an exaggerated inflammatory response.
IL-26 is an inflammatory mediator and a driver of chronic inflammation because of its ability to act as a carrier of extracellular DNA, and as an antimicrobial molecule through its capacity to form pores in bacterial membranes.
In addition, this article from the Yale School of Medicine states that high levels of neutrophils, inflammatory cells, are a biomarker for COVID-19 patients who become severely ill. The article also connects COVID-19 with obesity, believing obesity increases the risk of severe illness from COVID-19. Another biomarker is thrombomodulin, a soluble form of a protein on the surface of endothelial cells, which was highly correlated with survival among all COVID-19 patients
Here is an image of a neutrophil:
.png)
In an older article regarding biomarkers for the early stages of COVID-19, Professor Burkhard Becher and his team at the Institute of Experimental Immunology at the University of Zurich discovered that the number of natural killer T cells in the blood is a biomarker to predict the severity of the disease. As you learned, killer T cells, also known as Cytotoxic T Cells, are part of the Cell-Mediated Response to kill infected or cancerous cells. In this case, these T-cells help fight against the cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 to get rid of the virus from the body. The reason the vaccine is so important is that it creates memory cells that help prevent reinfection and improves the body’s reaction to the virus
Here is an image of a T-cell:
Biomarkers are significant because they give us an understanding of what the virus does to the body and how the body reacts to it. This information can be used to help find early suspicion of disease, confirm disease severity, classify the disease, rationalize therapies, assess response to therapies, and predict the outcome. I believe that by being able to better analyze COVID-19 using these biomarkers, we will eventually be able to control the spread of the virus and end this pandemic we are facing.
Do you think the COVID-19 virus will have another surge or will it lessen and continue to infect us similar to influenza?
Leave a Reply