{"id":100463,"date":"2020-03-28T17:31:47","date_gmt":"2020-03-29T00:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=100463"},"modified":"2020-03-28T17:31:47","modified_gmt":"2020-03-29T00:31:47","slug":"how-sick-will-the-coronavirus-make-you-the-answer-may-be-in-your-genes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/03\/28\/how-sick-will-the-coronavirus-make-you-the-answer-may-be-in-your-genes-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How sick will the coronavirus make you? The answer may be in your genes"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Jocelyn Kaiser<\/a> Courtesy Science<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Science\u2019s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVID-19, caused by the new pandemic coronavirus, is strangely\u2014and tragically\u2014selective. Only some infected people get sick, and although most of the critically ill are elderly or have complicating problems such as heart disease, some killed by the disease are previously healthy and even relatively young. Researchers are now gearing up to scour the patients\u2019 genomes for DNA variations that explain this mystery. The findings could be used to identify those most at risk of serious illness and those who might be protected, and they might also guide the search for new treatments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The projects range from ongoing studies with DNA for many thousands of participants, some now getting infected with the coronavirus, to new efforts that are collecting DNA from COVID-19 patients in hard-hit places such as Italy. The goal is to compare the DNA of people who have serious cases of COVID-19 (which stands for coronavirus disease 2019)\u2014but no underlying disease like diabetes, heart or lung disease\u2014with those with mild or no disease. We see huge differences in clinical outcomes and across countries. How much of that is explained by genetic susceptibility is a very open question,\u201d says geneticist Andrea Ganna of the University of Helsinki\u2019s Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to predict what will pop out from these gene hunts, some researchers say. But there are obvious suspects, such as the gene coding for the cell surface protein angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which the coronavirus uses to enter airway cells. Variations in the ACE2<\/em> gene that alter the receptor could make it easier or harder for the virus to get into cells, says immunologist Philip Murphy of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose lab identified a relatively common mutation in another human cell surface protein, CCR5, that makes some people highly resistant to HIV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ganna heads up a major effort to pool COVID-19 patients\u2019 genetic data from around the world. The idea came quite spontaneously\u201d about 2 weeks ago when everyone was sitting at their computers watching this crisis,\u201d says Ganna, who is also affiliated with the Broad Institute, a U.S. genomic powerhouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He and FIMM Director Mark Daly quickly created a\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0for their project, the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative, and reached out to colleagues who run large biobank studies that follow thousands of volunteers for years to look for links between their DNA and health. At least a dozen biobanks, mostly in Europe and the United States, have expressed interest in contributing COVID-19 data from participants who agreed to this. Among them are FinnGen, which has DNA samples and health data for 5% of the 5 million\u2013person Finnish population, and the 50,000-participant biobank at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UK Biobank, one of world\u2019s largest with DNA data for 500,000 participants<\/a>, also plans to add COVID-19 health data from participants to its data set, the project tweeted<\/a> this month. And the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics, which is helping test much of the nation\u2019s population<\/a> to see who is infected with the new coronavirus, has received government permission to add these data and any subsequent COVID-19 symptoms to its database, which contains genome and health data on half of Iceland\u2019s 364,000 inhabitants, says its CEO K\u00e1ri Stef\u00e1nsson. We will do our best to contribute to figuring this out,\u201d Stef\u00e1nsson says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another effort to identify protective or susceptibility DNA variants is the Personal Genome Project<\/a> led by Harvard University\u2019s George Church, which recruits people willing to share their full genome, tissue samples, and health data for research. Earlier this month, it sent questionnaires to its thousands of participants, asking about their COVID-19 status. More than 600 in the United States responded within 48 hours. It seems that most people want to do their part,\u201d says Church, whose group isn\u2019t yet part of Ganna\u2019s collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other researchers working with Ganna\u2019s initiative are recruiting COVID-19 patients directly within hospitals for such genomics studies. Italian geneticist Alessandra Renieri of the University of Siena expects at least 11 hospitals in the nation to give ethics approval for her team to collect DNA samples from willing patients. It is my opinion that [host] genetic differences are a key factor \u2026 for susceptibility to severe acute pneumonia,\u201d Renieri says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pediatrics researcher Jean-Laurent Casanova at the Rockefeller University, who specializes in identifying rare genes that can make healthy young people susceptible to certain serious diseases, is drawing on a network of pediatricians around the world to look for the relatively few young people who develop COVID-19 serious enough to get admitted to intensive care. We study exclusively patients who were previously healthy\u201d and under 50, as their serious COVID-19 illness is more likely to have a genetic basis, he explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to genetic variants of the ACE2 receptor, scientists want to see whether differences in the human leukocyte antigen genes, which influence the immune system\u2019s response to viruses and bacteria, affect disease severity. And some investigators want to follow up<\/a> a finding, which a Chinese team reported in a preprint<\/a>: that people with type O blood may be protected from the virus. We\u2019re trying to figure out if those findings are robust,\u201d says Stanford University human geneticist Manuel Rivas, who is contributing to Ganna\u2019s initiative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The catastrophic spread of the coronavirus should soon increase the number of COVID-19 patients available to these gene hunts. And that could speed findings. Ganna expects the first susceptibility genes could be identified within a couple of months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With reporting by Elizabeth Pennisi.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Jocelyn Kaiser Courtesy Science Science\u2019s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center. COVID-19, caused by the new pandemic coronavirus, is strangely\u2014and tragically\u2014selective. Only some infected people get sick, and although most of the critically ill are elderly or have complicating problems such as heart disease, some killed by the disease are previously healthy and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}