We speak with postdoctoral researcher Erola Pairo-Castineira about her recent work which aimed to find the genetic factors that may predispose individuals to critical COVID-19 and learn how COVID-19 affects cells in the body.
The disease-resistant patients exposing Covid-19 s weak spots
BBC
The disease-resistant patients exposing Covid-19 s weak spots
As a young man, Stephen Crohn could only watch helplessly as one by one, his friends began dying from a disease which had no name. When his partner, a gymnast called Jerry Green, fell desperately ill in 1978 with what we now know as Aids, Crohn simply assumed he was next.
But instead as Green became blind and emaciated as the HIV virus ravaged his body, Crohn remained completely healthy. Over the following decade, dozens of friends and other partners would meet a similar fate.
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This summer, a small group of researchers at the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, began to notice something unusual. They were looking at the DNA of thousands of people who had contracted Covid-19 and suffered severely – people who were touch-and-go in intensive care units, some who survived and some who didn’t.
The researchers were comparing these genetic profiles to those of people with similar backgrounds held in the UK BioBank, which holds information on half a million volunteers. The aim was to see if anything stood out in those who had been brought to the brink by Covid.