Found: genes that sway the course of the coronavirus

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Wed, 2020-10-14 13:28 — mike kraft

Found: genes that sway the course of the coronavirus Host variants boost severity risk, may point to drug options Science | AAAS

It’s one of the pandemic’s puzzles: Most people infected by SARS-CoV-2 never feel sick, whereas others develop serious symptoms or even end up in an intensive care unit clinging to life. Age and preexisting conditions, such as obesity, account for much of the disparity. But geneticists have raced to see whether a person’s DNA also explains why some get hit hard by the coronavirus, and they have uncovered tantalizing leads.

Now, a U.K. group studying more than 2200 COVID-19 patients has pinned down common gene variants that are linked to the most severe cases of the disease, and that point to existing drugs that could be repurposed to help. “It’s really exciting. Each one provides a potential target” for treatment, says genetic epidemiologist Priya Duggal of Johns Hopkins University.

Kenneth Baillie of the University of Edinburgh, an intensive care physician and geneticist, led the new study, which he discussed on 2 October at an online meeting of a data-pooling effort called the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative. He’s hoping the results, also posted as a preprint on medRxiv, will speed treatments, although he cautions that any clinical trial inspired by the findings should wait for the study’s acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal. “Because the epidemic is progressing at such an alarming rate, even a few months of time saved will save lots of lives,” Baillie says.

In a standard approach to finding genes that influence a condition, geneticists scan the DNA of large numbers of people for millions of marker sequences, looking for associations between specific markers and cases of the disease. In June, one such genomewide association study in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) found two “hits” linked to respiratory failure in 1600 Italian and Spanish COVID-19 patients: a marker within the ABO gene, which determines a person’s blood type, and a stretch of chromosome 3 that holds a half-dozen genes. Those two links have also emerged in other groups’ data, including some from the DNA testing company 23andMe. ...

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