IIT-Bombay, Kasturba hospital conduct study to determine Covid-19 severity

Covid tests being conducted at the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus on September 18. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay along with Kasturba Hospital for Infectious Diseases have conducted a study on the use of mass spectrometry to determine the intensity of Covid-19 infection. This will help in understanding the severity of the infection in positive patients, which in turn can help in providing effective healthcare. The study funded by the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research and IIT-B has been published in iScience, an open-access journal from Cell Press.

The researchers have found that the quantities of specific proteins in the nasopharyngeal samples of a person can differentiate between less and more severity of the infection. Professor Sanjeeva Srivastava, who led the IIT-B team, explained, "Mass spectrometry is a tool that can detect whether a particular protein is present in a sample and in what percentage. The commonly done RT-PCR test uses a reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction to detect the virus's nucleic acid. But specific viral or host proteins, released at different stages of the infection, have stories to tell. By identifying which protein is released at which stage, we can determine the severity of the disease."

Explaining the process, Prof. Srivastava stated, "The researchers compared the protein profiles of Covid-19 positive and Covid-19 negative samples and identified 25 of them that were present in higher quantities in the positive patients. These 25 proteins could potentially be used to determine whether a sample is Covid positive or negative. Then Covid-19 recovered samples were used to identify whether these proteins also indicated progression towards severity or recovery. Thus, recovered patients were used as another control to narrow down the list of significant proteins that were altered only in the positive patients. The second step was to find proteins that differentiated severe cases from the non-severe ones. The 24 Covid-19 positive samples consisted of 11 non-severe and 13 severe ones. We identified six significant proteins that could differentiate between severe and non-severe patients."

25
No. of proteins that were present in higher quantities in positive patients