The why behind mild COVID-19

All-Luxembourg study helps to anticipate a personal COVID-19 health trajectory - From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of published studies have focused on severe COVID-19 patients in order to understand the causes of critical illness. However, it is equally, if not more important to understand the protective immune factors in our body. Using state-of-the-art deep immune profiling and systems immunology-driven data analysis, the translational biomedical research team, led by the Department of Infection and Immunity of the Luxembourg Institute of Health and including University of Luxembourg researchers, revealed that it is the unique combination of various early-stage immune responses that can differentiate between mild patients, hospitalized COVID-19 patients and their non-infected household controls. The insurgence of COVID-19 has had dramatic effects worldwide, leading to an unprecedented diversification and intensification in research efforts to counteract its spread. However, while immunopathology has been widely studied in severe COVID-19 patients, immune responses in non-hospitalized patients have remained largely elusive. Furthermore, research to date has lacked a comprehensive multi-faceted approach to the full immune response following infection. It was therefore unknown, up to now, whether the immune alterations present in hospitalized individuals were also present in mild COVID-19 PCR-positive patients.