Date: Oct. 13, 2020
Source: School of Medicine
Authors: Li Gao & Bai Jian

A team of JNU researchers has discovered a panel of predictive factors for progression to severe COVID-19 pneumonia.  The JNU team -- Professors Fan Jun, Luo Junhong and  Wang Huadong and senior experimentalist Jia Hongling from the School of Medicine – was joined in the research by Chief Physician Yang Zhicong and researcher Di Biao from the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Prof. Liang Huiying from Guangdong Research Center for Medical Data Intelligent Application Engineering Technology. Their paper has been published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy IF= 13.5, a Nature publication.
 

The research showed that 20% of COVID-19 patients developed life-threatening illness. Therefore, it is now an urgent need to save patients' lives and optimize allocation of medical resources by finding in early COVID-19 patients, at the molecular level, the clue to the progression to severe COVID-19.

The team applied the method of combining proteomic profiling and machine learning to analyze blood serum from COVID-19 patients. It found that three proteins -- homolog (OAF), D-dopachrome decarboxylase (DDT)，myoglobin (MB) -- are the optimal combination to pre-diagnose the progression of COVID-19 patients from moderate to severe disease. To verify the results and put them into clinical practice, the team adopted enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), which is clinically more common, convenient and economical. By doing so，the team verified the effectiveness of the predictive factors.
 

The discovery is of referential and instructive significance, helping clinical hospitals' systematic management of COVID-19 patients, guidance for their prognosis, and governments' rational allocation of the limited medical resources.
Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-00333-1