SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Signatures for Predicting the Outcome of COVID-19 (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Background: The COIVD-19 global pandemic is far from ending. There is an urgent need to identify applicable biomarkers for predicting the outcome of COVID-19. Growing evidences have revealed that SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies remain elevated with disease progression and severity in COIVD-19 patients. We assumed that antibodies may serve as biomarkers for predicting disease outcome.Method: By taking advantage of a newly developed SARS-CoV-2 proteome microarray, we surveyed IgM/IgG responses against 20 SARS-CoV-2 proteins in 1,034 hospitalized COVID-19 patients on admission, who were followed till 66 days. The microarray results were further correlated with clinical information, laboratory test results and patient outcomes. Cox proportional hazards model was used to explore the association between SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies and COVID-19 mortality.Results: We found that high level of IgM against ORF7b at the time of hospitalization is an independent predictor of patient survival ( p  trend = 0.002), while levels of IgG responses to 6 non-structural proteins and 1 accessory protein, i. e., NSP4, NSP7, NSP9, NSP10, RdRp (NSP12), NSP14, and ORF3b, possess significant predictive power for patient death, even after further adjustments for demographics, comorbidities, and common laboratory markers for disease severity (all with p trend < 0.05). Spline regression analysis indicated that the correlation between ORF7b IgM, NSP9 IgG, and NSP10 IgG and the risk of COVID-19 mortality shows linear ( p = 0.0013, 0.0073 and 0.0003, respectively). Their AUCs for predictions, determined by computational cross-validations (validation1), were 0.74 (cut-off = 7.59), 0.66 (cut-off = 9.13), and 0.68 (cut-off = 6.29), respectively. Further validations were conducted in the second and third serial samples of these cases (validation2A, n = 633, validation2B, n = 382), with high accuracy of prediction for outcome.Conclusion: These findings have important implications for improving clinical management, and especially for developing medical interventions and vaccines.Funding Statement This work was supported by grants from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HUST COVID-19 Rapid Response Call No. 2020kfyXGYJ040) and Wuhan Bureau of Science and Technology (No. 2020020601012218).Declaration of Interests The authors declare no conflicts of interest.Ethics Approval Statement The study was approved by the Ethical Committee of Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China (IRB IDTJ-C20200128).