Discovery of how blood clots harm brain and body in COVID-19 points to new therapy

 

Researchers have found that the blood coagulation protein fibrin is responsible for the unusual clotting and inflammation that have come to be recognized as hallmarks of COVID-19. Additionally, fibrin has been shown to suppress the body's ability to eliminate the virus, which changes our understanding of the disease and its most puzzling symptoms.

 Crucially, the group also discovered a fresh antibody treatment to counteract all of these negative consequences.

The research by Gladstone Institutes and associates, which was published in Nature, disproves the conventional wisdom that blood clotting in COVID-19 is just a result of inflammation. The researchers demonstrate that blood clotting is indeed a key consequence, causing other issues such as toxic inflammation, reduced virus clearance, and neurological symptoms seen in individuals with COVID-19 and extended COVID, through lab and mouse tests.

Fibrin, a blood protein that typically permits good blood coagulation but has been demonstrated to have harmful inflammatory effects in the past, is the trigger. According to the current study, fibrin becomes much more harmful in COVID-19 because it connects to immune cells and the virus, forming abnormal clots that cause fibrosis, inflammation, and neuronal death.

"We can create a new avenue for treating the disease at its core now that we know fibrin is the initiator of inflammation and neurological symptoms," says Katerina Akassoglou, PhD, a senior investigator at Gladstone and the head of the Centre for Neurovascular Brain Immunology at Gladstone and UC San Francisco. "In our experiments in mice, neutralizing blood toxicity with fibrin antibody therapy can protect the brain and body after COVID infection."

Even in people who did not exhibit any other symptoms, abnormal blood clotting and stroke became perplexing side effects of COVID-19 from the very beginning of the epidemic. Later, as COVID started to pose a serious threat to public health, there was even more reason to figure out what was causing the disease's other symptoms, such its impact on the nervous system.

Since the beginning of the epidemic, more than 400 million individuals worldwide have had protracted COVID, at an estimated annual economic cost of over $1 trillion.

 

Flipping the Conversation

Blood clotting and stroke are thought to be caused by inflammation resulting from the immune system's quick response to the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a number of scientific and medical theories. However, Akassoglou and her scientific associates didn't think that explanation made sense even at the start of the pandemic in 2020.
"Cold clotting activity is something that we see with COVID, but we know of many other viruses that cause a similar cytokine storm in response to infection," says Warner Greene, MD, PhD, senior investigator and director emeritus at Gladstone, who co-led the study with Akassoglou.