Impairment of T cells' antiviral and anti-inflammation immunities may be critical to death from COVID-19.
R Soc Open Sci
; 8(12): 211606, 2021 Dec.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1758981
ABSTRACT
Clarifying dominant factors determining the immune heterogeneity from non-survivors to survivors is crucial for developing therapeutics and vaccines against COVID-19. The main difficulty is quantitatively analysing the multi-level clinical data, including viral dynamics, immune response and tissue damages. Here, we adopt a top-down modelling approach to quantify key functional aspects and their dynamical interplay in the battle between the virus and the immune system, yielding an accurate description of real-time clinical data involving hundreds of patients for the first time. The quantification of antiviral responses gives that, compared to antibodies, T cells play a more dominant role in virus clearance, especially for mild patients (96.5%). Moreover, the anti-inflammatory responses, namely the cytokine inhibition and tissue repair rates, also positively correlate with T cell number and are significantly suppressed in non-survivors. Simulations show that the lack of T cells can lead to more significant inflammation, proposing an explanation for the monotonic increase of COVID-19 mortality with age and higher mortality for males. We propose that T cells play a crucial role in the immunity against COVID-19, which provides a new direction-improvement of T cell number for advancing current prevention and treatment.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Type of study:
Prognostic study
Topics:
Vaccines
Language:
English
Journal:
R Soc Open Sci
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
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