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

该项目旨在加速开发 **GlyHealth-COVID** 的概念验证原型--我们正在设计的一种医疗技术，用于识别“** 免疫脆弱 **”的个体，这些个体有患重病或死于COVID-19的高风险。据认为，只有老年人会得重病并死于COVID-19，但大约25%的人65岁以下的人死亡率最高，甚至在年轻、显然健康的人中也有重病和死亡。使用当前的医疗技术，医生无法预见哪些新冠肺炎患者的健康状况会最差，因此他们必须猜测--这通常会带来灾难性的后果。我们的工作是早期发现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相似，但速度大大加快。我们的分析表明，最脆弱的COVID患者是“免疫脆弱”的个体，他们的免疫系统已经耗尽并进入免疫状态-但不是杀死病毒，而是产生一场炎症风暴，开始杀死人自己的身体细胞。免疫脆弱是我们在十多年的研究中发展出来的一个概念。这是一种非常复杂的疾病，有各种各样的原因，都导致高水平的慢性炎症。目前的医疗技术只能测量急性炎症，而不能测量与免疫脆弱相关的慢性炎症。我们开发了一种名为 **GlyHealth** 的医疗技术，可以通过 ** 血液中生物分子模式 ** 的变化可靠地测量个体的免疫脆弱和慢性炎症。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的炎症风暴的信号。GlyHealth-COVID是GlyHealth-IBD测试的简化版本，我们开发了该测试，以帮助胃肠病学家照顾炎症性肠病（IBD）患者。GlyHealth-IBD可以在炎症风暴强大到足以造成损害之前长达18个月可靠地预测IBD患者未来的炎症风暴，从而能够早期主动治疗疾病。我们的初始项目是采用GlyHealth-IBD并对其进行调整以产生GlyHealth-COVID原型。此项目扩展旨在扩展初始工作，并通过对COVID-19血液样本的额外测试和分析进一步验证我们的GlyHealth平台。然后，我们可以在最初的临床研究中测试它识别免疫脆弱的COVID-19患者的能力。如果它像GlyHealth-IBD一样运行，那么GlyHealth-COVID将能够从少量（0.2 ml）血液样本中可靠地识别脆弱的COVID-19患者。样本可以采取易于使用的手指采血套件，可以在家里使用。

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.