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

GlyHealth-COVID：一种精准医学测试，用于识别因 COVID-19 罹患重病或死亡的高风险免疫脆弱患者

• 批准号: 69371
• 金额: $ 9.13万
• 依托单位: LUDGER LIMITED
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Feasibility Studies
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=69371
• 关键词: GlyHealth; COVID; precision; medicine; test

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.

该项目旨在加速 **GlyHealth-COVID** 概念验证原型的开发，这是我们设计的一项医疗技术，旨在识别因 COVID-19 而罹患重病或死亡的高风险“**免疫功能低下**”的个体\。最初，人们认为只有老年人才会因 COVID-19 病重并死亡，但大约 25% 的死亡病例是 65 岁以下患有严重疾病的人 疾病和死亡甚至发生在看似健康的年轻人身上。使用当前的医疗技术，医生无法预见哪些 COVID-19 患者的健康状况会最差，因此他们必须进行猜测，这往往会带来灾难性的后果。我们的工作是早期检测和预测慢性和急性炎症性疾病 (ID) 患者的健康轨迹。 COVID-19 是一种急性 ID，其导致疾病和死亡的方式与慢性 ID 类似，但速度大大加快。我们的分析表明，最脆弱的新冠患者是“免疫虚弱”的个体，他们的免疫系统已经耗尽并进入超速运转状态，但它们并没有杀死病毒，而是产生了炎症风暴，开始杀死人自己的身体细胞。免疫虚弱是我们在十多年的研究中提出的一个概念。这是一种非常复杂的疾病，有多种原因，都会导致高度慢性炎症。目前的医疗技术只能测量急性炎症，而不能测量与免疫衰弱相关的慢性炎症。我们开发了一种名为 **GlyHealth** 的医疗技术，可以根据**血液中生物分子模式**的变化可靠地测量个体的免疫衰弱和慢性炎症。这可以在不受急性炎症干扰的情况下完成。这些模式是可以预测危险炎症风暴的信号。GlyHealth-COVID 是 GlyHealth-IBD 测试的简化版本，我们开发该测试是为了帮助胃肠病学家护理炎症性肠病 (IBD) 患者。 GlyHealth-IBD 可以在 IBD 患者未来的炎症风暴强大到足以造成损害之前长达 18 个月内可靠地预测，从而能够及早主动治疗疾病。我们最初的项目是采用 GlyHealth-IBD 并对其进行调整以生产 GlyHealth-COVID 原型。该项目扩展旨在扩展初始工作，并通过对 COVID-19 血液样本进行额外测试和分析来进一步验证我们的 GlyHealth 平台。然后，我们可以在初步临床研究中测试其识别免疫脆弱的 COVID-19 患者的能力。如果它的表现与 GlyHealth-IBD 类似，那么 GlyHealth-COVID 将能够从少量 (0.2ml) 血液样本中可靠地识别出易受影响的 COVID-19 患者。可以使用易于使用的指尖采血套件来采集样本，该套件可以在家中使用。