–Sanket Roy, Team bioXone
Hyperactivation of the immune system under SARS-CoV-2 infection is one of the most important features of COVID-19. While the early detection of COVID- 19 became the most emerging field of research, a team of scientists led by Hyung Chun of Yale University has identified that detection of neutrophil levels in plasma can indicate the severity of the disease in patients.
Neutrophils are one among the fighter cells in innate immunity that show a prompt response to any kind of infection but also cause damage to uninfected tissues. The study was done via the detection of protein levels in the blood plasma using machine learning. A study among 3300 COVID 19 patients was conducted. A number of patients among them who developed a more severe form of the disease were previously diagnosed with higher levels of neutrophil associated proteins in the plasma than the ones who did not escalate to the severe stage of the disease. It also has been found that patients with high neutrophil levels show a high mortality rate.
Source- A neutrophil activation signature predicts critical illness and mortality in COVID-19, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.01.20183897
COVID-19 or DENGUE?
–Arpita Adhikary, Amity University Kolkata When the 21st century is facing pandemic, it is reported that Dengue and coronavirus share almost similar clinical features that cannot be discriminated. There are few independent research studies that observed false-positive tests for coronavirus. In Singapore, two false-positive results from rapid serological testing for dengue was later confirmed to […]