A NEW COVID-19 RESEARCH EFFORT
Under Dr. Merad's leadership, Mount Sinai has become an international hub for the study of the human immune system. She developed Mount Sinai's Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC) as one of the world's most sophisticated research centers; it uses cutting-edge single-cell technology to understand the contribution of immune cells to major human diseases or treatment responses. HIMC participates in several major consortia funded by the National Institutes of Health.
This center will now play a key role in helping Dr. Merad and her colleagues understand why some patients develop severe forms of COVID-19 and some do not. For the past six weeks, she has led a major effort at Mount Sinai with her colleague Alexander Charney, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Neuroscience, and Neurosurgery, to collect blood samples from 500 hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The collection is still ongoing.
She says, "We will use the HIMC to analyze the inflammatory response that is triggered in our patients as a result of COVID-19, as well as the adaptive immune response to the virus." Her goals for the project include the ability to predict which patients will develop a severe inflammatory response and then find ways to prevent and treat it.
Yet, she adds, even when some patients recover from the disease, they continue to have negative effects. "We do not know if it's because inflammation persists and does not resolve. There is still a lot to learn. We will be following these patients for a long time because we need to monitor the resolution of inflammation and the quality of the immune response that these patients develop and see whether this response is protective."
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