Refining the search for long-COVID biomarkers

Thomas Vogl at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, together with colleagues at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands, plan to use their Global Grant for Gut Health to identify potential biomarkers for long COVID by screening for antibodies against hundreds of thousands structures on gut microbes.

What are the aims of your project?

COVID-19 will most likely never go away — it will keep on evolving and finding ways to evade our immune systems. And long COVID will continue to place a burden on healthcare systems and economies around the world. If we can find biomarkers that indicate a person’s risk of developing long COVID and therapeutic targets for people who have the condition, it could transform our ability to treat, and perhaps even prevent, long COVID in the future.

Our GGGH project will provide an initial sweep of large-scale cohorts to identify potential signatures related to the development of long COVID. We will profile antibody responses against 357,000 microbiota and viral antigens in 800 patients with COVID or long COVID.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-024-00092-5