News
Why Are Some COVID Cases More Severe? ‘Humanized’ Mice Offer a Clue
Why do 80 to 90% of people infected with COVID-19 experience only mild cases while 10 to 20% face more severe or life-threatening symptoms? Researchers in the lab of Yale’s Richard Flavell decided to pose this question to a “humanized mice” and revealed that the causes of severe COVID may lie in our own antiviral inflammatory response to the virus, the researchers report Dec. 17 in the journal Nature Biotechnology, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-01155-4.
“Early in the course of disease, a strong immune response is crucial for survival,” Sefik said. “Later in the disease, it can be fatal.” The humanized mice models might also reveal strong clues to the causes and potential treatments of so-called long and severe COVID, the scientists said.
The research was done in collaboration with Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki, Craig Wilen, Yuval Kluger, Eric Meffre, and Stephanie Halene.