Giulia Marchetti, from the ASST Santi Paolo e Carlo, one of the EuCARE partners, will give a presentation about the “ongoing symptomatic COVID-19 in acutely ill hospitalized COVID-19 patients” on 31st of May in the 7th edition of the “Reseach to policy action” dialogue.
This edition of the “Research to policy action” dialogue will focus on Post COVID-19 condition and the aim of this dialogue is to exchange knowledge on the Post COVID-19 condition between research projects and public health policy actors. The main aim of this dialogue is to provide evidence that can contribute to public health policy to address Post COVID-19 condition, and support EU actions and future research activity in future pandemics.
In this edition, Giulia Marchetti will give a talk about the EuCARE project, where they investigated the interplay between host immunological responses and SARS-CoV-2 in long-COVID development. To date, various studies attempted to define the immune responses, as well as virological parameters, of individuals developing long-COVID, with seemingly conflicting data based on the clinical manifestations of long-COVID, time of sample collection, study cohorts, immunological and virological parameters. Inevitably, this hampered the identification of a pathogenicity model, and of therapeutical strategies.
To this aim, Giulia Marchetti and researchers from her laboratory characterized 48 hospitalized unvaccinated COVID-19 individuals which developed long-COVID at about 1-3 months from clinical healing and compared to a matched group who did not develop long-COVID.
In their study, Giulia Marchetti showed that individuals developing long-COVID display profound humoral response dysregulation and an enrichment of terminally differentiated CD4 T cells which is positively associated to plasma viral genetic material (i.e. SARS-CoV-2 RNemia). Additionally, individuals developing long-COVID showed an impairment in the magnitude of SARS-CoV-2-specific CD4 T cells. Therefore, in this cohort of acutely ill hospitalized and unvaccinated COVID-19 patients, immune dysregulation both in the humoral and cellular arms seems to have an important role in the development of long-COVID.
The participation of the EuCARE partner in this dialogue is very important and an excellent opportunity to share some knowledge and raise awareness about the project, among the participants, which includes representatives from EU-funded projects, from ECDC, EMA and others.
The program of this event is below.
