The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic manifests itself as a mild
respiratory tract infection in most individuals, leading to
COVID-19 disease. However, in some infected individuals, this can progress to severe
pneumonia and
acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), leading to multi-organ failure and death. This study explores the proteomic differences between mild, severe, and critical
COVID-19 positive patients to further understand the
disease progression, identify
proteins associated with disease severity, and identify potential therapeutic targets.
Blood protein profiling was performed on 59
COVID-19 mild (n = 26), severe (n = 9) or critical (n = 24) cases and 28 controls using the OLINK
inflammation, autoimmune, cardiovascular and neurology panels. Differential expression analysis was performed within and between disease groups to generate nine different analyses. From the 368
proteins measured per individual, more than 75% were observed to be significantly perturbed in
COVID-19 cases. Six
proteins (
IL6, CKAP4, Gal-9, IL-1ra, LILRB4 and PD-L1) were identified to be associated with disease severity. The results have been made readily available through an interactive web-based application for instant data exploration and visualization, and can be accessed at https://phidatalab-shiny.rosalind.kcl.ac.uk/
COVID19/ . Our results demonstrate that dynamic changes in
blood proteins associated with disease severity can potentially be used as early
biomarkers to monitor disease severity in
COVID-19 and serve as potential therapeutic targets.