Low admission protein C levels are a risk factor for disease worsening and mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19

At present, the clinical course of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is unpredictable and can rapidly develop, causing severe and deadly complications. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify reliable biomarkers related to COVID-19 disease progression and death for diagnostics as well as to identify pathways that are amenable to existing or new therapeutics. We aimed to characterize admission plasma levels of 12 hemostatic proteins in hospitalized COVID-19 patients in order to identify proteins associated with risk of disease worsening including death within 28 days. The data used here is from a publicly available longitudinal COVID-19 cohort collected at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston, USA (with institutional review board approval. Here we provide evidence that lowered hospital admission plasma levels of protein C in COVID-19 patients presenting with moderate or severe illness may be a useful biomarker for disease worsening and high mortality risk.