Researchers at the University of San Diego (USA) have joined forces with researchers from United Kingdom in a retrospective observational study to investigate a syndrome related to covid after seeing that some patients had a autoimmune disease very rare called MDA5: dermatomyositis (DM) associated with autoantibodies in patients who may or may not have contracted covid.”
The researchers wanted to know if there was a Connection between MDA5-positive dermatomyositis and COVID-19. “The DM is more common in people of Asian descentparticularly Japanese and Chinese,” says Pradipta Ghosh of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. “However, Dr. McGonagle was noticing this explosive trend of cases in Caucasians“, Add.
“BoNE is designed to ignore the factors that differentiate patients in a group while selectively identifies which is common (shared) among all members of the group,” Ghosh explained.
Previous applications of BoNE allowed Ghosh and his team to identifyr other pulmonary and cardiac syndromes related to COVID in adults and children, respectively.
Ghosh and Dennis McGonagle, a professor of research rheumatology at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, formed a team to investigate what they found was actually a completely new syndrome.
The study began with the McGonagle laboratory’s detection of autoantibodies against MDA5, an RNA sensing enzyme whose functions include the detection of COVID-19 and other RNA viruses. A total of 25 patients out of a group of 60 developed lung scarsalso known as interstitial lung disease.
Ghosh noted that the lung scars were sufficiently serious enough to cause the death of eight people in the group due to progressive fibrosis. He said there are established clinical profiles of MDA5 autoimmune diseases.
Ghosh and the UC San Diego team explored McGonagle’s data with BoNE. They found that patients who showed the higher level of MDA5 response also showed high levels of interleukin-15.
“Interleukin-15 is a cytokine that can cause two main types of immune cells,” he explains. “These can push cells to the edge of exhaustion and create an immunological phenotype that is very, very often seen as a hallmark of progressive interstitial lung disease or lung fibrosis,” he adds.
BoNE allowed the team to establish the cause of Yorkshire syndrome and pinpoint a specific single nucleotide polymorphism that has a protective effect. By right of discovery, the group was able to give a name to the disease: MDA5-autoimmunity and interstitial pneumonitis contemporaneous with COVID-19.
Is MY PC for short, “It’s pronounced ‘mipsy,'” Ghosh said, adding that the name was coined to draw a connection to MIS-C, a separate COVID-related childhood condition.
Ghosh says it is extremely unlikely that MIP-C will be limited to the UK. Reports of MIP-C symptoms They come from all over the world. He said he hopes the team’s identification of interleukin-15 as a causal link will spur treatment research.
