COVID-19 in people with HIV - a longitudinal proteomics study

Background

COVID-19 may be more severe in people with HIV (PWH), but the mechanisms contributing to this are poorly understood. A team from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston used three Olink® Target 96 panels for targeted protein biomarker discovery to undertake a longitudinal proteomics study in PWH undergoing anti-retroviral therapy. Leveraging data from the REPRIEVE clinical trial cohort, they compared protein profiles between matched cases and controls who did or did not develop COVID-19 during the course of the study. Among the COVID cases, 40% were characterized as mild and 60% moderate to severe, and median time from SARS-CoV-2 infection to follow-up sampling was 4 months.

Outcome

The longitudinal analysis revealed some interesting temporal patterns of protein changes linked to disease severity. In patients with moderate/severe COVID, NOS3 was significantly increased over time, while levels of ANG, CASP-8, CD5, GZMH, GZMB, ITGB2 & KLRD1 decreased. Pathway analysis was used to interpret these data as relevant adaptive and maladaptive changes in inflammatory, immune, and fibrotic pathways underlying moderate-to-severe COVID-19 in PWH.

Also of potential importance, pre-infection levels of the three granzyme proteins, GZMA, GZMB & GZMH were shown to be an independent risk factor for the development of subsequent moderate-to-severe COVID-19 among these patients. This observation is of significant interest since granzymes are serine proteases produced by cytotoxic T-cells and NK cells that induce apoptosis in virus-infected cells.

Kolossvary-et-al-2023

Citation

Kolossváry M, deFilippi C, McCallum S, et al. Identification of pre-infection markers and differential plasma protein expression following SARS-CoV-2 infection in people living with HIV. (2023) EBioMedicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2023.104538

These findings may help to guide future directions with respect to: 1) improving clinical prediction of which PWH are at greatest risk of developing severe COVID-19 so as to most effectively deploy preventive and therapeutic strategies; 2) understanding which persistent changes in immune-regulatory proteins post-COVID are maladaptive

Kolossváry et al. (2023)

Peer-reviewed publications citing the use of Olink panels

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