Older people and those with underlying conditions are most at risk of dying from the coronavirus – but otherwise healthy young people become seriously ill and even die of the disease.
And the fate of these young coronavirus patients can be written into their DNA, some scientists suspect.
About 80 percent of people who die from coronavirus are 65 years of age or older, but data published last month by the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) found that nearly 40 percent of hospitalized coronavirus patients are young or middle-aged adults.
Dr. Jean-Laurent Casanova of Rockefeller University thinks that these rare, young patients who fall so desperately, seemingly randomly, may have invisible risk factors called “congenital immunity errors.”
He and his international team of employees are recruiting coronavirus patients in their 30s, 40s and 50s whose diseases are life threatening and plan to sequence and test their genetics in search of a piece of code that makes them more vulnerable.
Scientists suspect that the reason some otherwise healthy, young adults die from the coronavirus (photo) may be in their DNA – and now they’re trying to study it
In addition to obvious properties such as our hair and eye color, our DNA also contains instructions for our body to build everything from brain cells and bones to the core of our immune system.
Chronic health problems such as heart and lung disease and diabetes also affect the immune system, reducing our natural ability to fight infection.
Some people are born immunodeficient due to genetic conditions or variations.
But Dr. Casanova is one of the scientists at the forefront of the discovery that genetics may also predispose some people to cancer specific infections, not in contrast to the effects of the BRCA genes on the risks of certain malignancies, especially breast cancer.
“Some people have genetic variations that make them selectively vulnerable to that particular virus that remains silent until the patient is affected by this particular virus,” Dr. Casanova in a Skype interview with DailyMail.com.
It’s a phenomenon he and his team saw in a toddler who was deathly ill from the flu. it turned out that the child had a variant of a gene that encodes an element of the immune system that otherwise functions as an alarm system.
Conrad Buchanan (left) was just 39 and had no underlying health issues, but he died of the corona virus last month, leaving behind his wife, Nicole (right).
Because of this anomaly in his DNA, his body didn’t get the message that flu had invaded his cells, so it wasn’t causing the right attack.
They have also seen this pattern in people who are more sensitive to tuberculosis. These patients were deficient in signal cells called interferon – and there is already a pharmaceutical substitute to replace them, meaning the discovery could lead to prevention or treatment for these patients.
Now Dr. Casanova and his team focus on COVID-19.
Rockefeller, like the vast majority of companies and institutions in the US, has discontinued all activities except those related to the coronavirus pandemic.
Dr. Jean-Laurent Casanova of Rockefeller University discovered “congenital immunity errors” that cause some youth to develop a life-threatening illness from the flu. He is now investigating whether the same applies to young COVID-19 patients
So Dr. Casanova is in a team of about eight.
But they have already started gathering patients from all over the world – most of them in the US and France – to study.
“We are recruiting patients, the relatively rare patients with an unexplained, serious illness,” said Dr. Casanova.
Once they have those patients – they are already recruited between 10 and 20 in the U.S. – who have a “life-threatening illness,” meaning they need oxygen support, Dr. Casanova and his team start by determining their genes and looking for candidate variations.
These are genes that “ look promising that they can be the cause of disease, ” says Dr. Casanova.
And if they find these genes, they may also find other similarities between these patients.
While his and other labs have looked at congenital immunity errors for viruses such as the flu and bacterial infections such as tuberculosis, Dr. Casnova, as far as science knows, has not studied genetic variations that weaken some people’s immune systems against any coronavirus, including the common cold, SARS or MERS.
“At least if we crack a number of genetic cases, hypothetically [it could hold clues for patterns] of severe COVID in non-genetic patients, “says Dr. Casanova.
“Perhaps for several reasons, the same immunity mechanism can be disrupted in older patients.”
Such a discovery would be a major breakthrough, but it will not be immediate.
“It would be the coming year, not the coming months,” said Dr. Casanova.
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