GlyHealth-COVID: A precision medicine test to identify ImmunoFrail patients at high risk of becoming severely ill or dying from COVID-19

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This project is to accelerate the development of a proof-of-concept prototype of **GlyHealth-COVID** - a medical technology we are designing to identify '**immunofrail**' individuals who are at high risk of becoming severely ill or dying from COVID-19\.Initially, it was thought that only the elderly would get very sick and die from COVID-19 but around 25% of deaths have been in those aged below 65 with severe sickness and death occurring even in young, apparently fit, individuals. Using current medical technology doctors cannot foresee which of their COVID-19 patients will have the worst health outcomes so they must guess - often with disastrous consequences.Our work is on early detection and prediction of the health trajectories of patients with chronic and acute inflammatory diseases (IDs). COVID-19 is an acute-ID which causes sickness and death in similar ways to chronic-IDs but at greatly accelerated speeds. Our analysis suggests that the most vulnerable COVID patients are 'immunofrail' individuals whose immune systems are exhausted and go into overdrive - but instead of killing the virus they produce an inflammatory storm that starts killing the person's own body cells.Immunofrailty is a concept we have developed during over a decade of research. It is a very complex condition with a wide range of causes that all lead to high levels of chronic inflammation. Current medical technology can only measure acute inflammation, not immunofrailty-related chronic inflammation.We have developed a medical technology called **GlyHealth** that reliably measures immunofrailty and chronic-inflammation in individuals from changes in **biomolecular patterns in their blood**. This can be done without interference from acute inflammation. Those patterns are signals that can predict dangerous inflammatory storms.GlyHealth-COVID is a streamlined version of a test called GlyHealth-IBD test that we have developed to help gastroenterologists caring for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients. GlyHealth-IBD can reliably predict future inflammatory storms in IBD patients up to 18 months before the storms are powerful enough to cause damage, enabling early proactive treatment of the disease.The initial project is for us to take GlyHealth-IBD and adjust it to produce the GlyHealth-COVID prototype. This project extension is to expand the initial work and further validate our GlyHealth platform with additional testing & analysis of COVID-19 blood samples. We can then test its ability to identify immunofrail COVID-19 patients in an initial clinical study.If it performs like GlyHealth-IBD then GlyHealth-COVID would be able to reliably identify vulnerable COVID-19 patients from small (0.2ml) samples of their blood. The samples can be taken with easy-to-use fingerprick blood collection kits which can used at home.