In a recent pre-print paper, experts in Newcastle share research findings on a detailed examination of the immune system during COVID-19.

In collaboration with Cambridge University, Wellcome Sanger Institute, European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and University College London (UCL), experts from Newcastle University have contributed to vital research profiling the immune response in COVID-19.

Professor Muzz Haniffa, lead for the NIHR Newcastle BRC’s Skin and Oral theme commented:

The immune response in COVID-19 patients’ blood showed stark differences across disease severity, from asymptomatic to critical disease. Furthermore, our analysis provided a glimpse of the systemic effects in the lung and the bone marrow during COVID-19.

This single cell multiomics data is the most substantive to date and is freely available to download and browse through a dedicated webportal 

Professor Haniffa adds:

This study was only possible through a large multi-disciplinary team effort across the institutions encompassing expertise in clinical medicine, genomics, bioinformatics and immunology.

Comments from the team

Other co-first authors from Newcastle University commented on the success of these findings, stating:

Not only is this study valuable for the findings we report here, but also in the high quality data which we make available to the wider research community and the expertise, experience and insight they possess to extract even more from it. At Newcastle, collection, analysis and interpretation of this data was possible because of the facilities available to us, proximity to the hospital, and the seamless collaboration between clinicians and researchers.

Dr Rachel Botting, Newcastle University

As a scientist, my first thought at the start of the pandemic was “how can we help to understand this new disease?”. It quickly became apparent to us that we could utilise the state of the art technology that is available to us here at Newcastle and work closely with our clinical colleagues to study COVID-19. We hope our data and conclusions can provide the scientific community, and beyond, some answers to how the immune system reacts to this complex disease.

Emily Stephenson, PhD Student/Research Assistant, Newcastle University

The data is available for visualisation and exploration here 

More information

The preprint paper is available here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.13.21249725v1

Main image: Figure 1 showing single cell multi-omic analysis of COVID-19 patients’ PBMC