As the world has been going through a tough time with Covid-19 around, a ray of hope sparks amidst the efforts to find a vaccine and battle against this infection.
An Indian-American scientist has identified a relevant strategy to prevent life-threatening inflammation, lung damage and organ failure in patients diagnosed with Covid-19.
This research has been published in the journal cell and it is coming from Dr Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti’s lab. She is an Indian-born researcher working at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee. She was born and brought up in Kanneganti, Telangana.
She received her undergraduate degree at Kakatiya University in Warangal, where she majored in Chemistry, Zoology, and Botany. She then received her M.Sc. and Ph.D from Osmania University in India. She is in the US since 2007.
She found drugs after finding out that the hyperinflammatory immune response related to Covid-19 ends up damaging tissues and causes multi-organ failure in a mice after triggering inflammatory cell death pathways.
“Understanding the pathways and mechanism driving this inflammation is critical to develop effective treatment strategies,” said Kanneganti, vice chair of the St Jude Department of Immunology.
“This research provides that understanding. We also identified the specific cytokines that activate inflammatory cell death pathways and have considerable potential for treatment of Covid-19 and other highly fatal diseases, including sepsis,” she said.
The other researchers were from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center – Shraddha Tuladhar, Parimal Samir, Min Zheng, Balamurugan Sundaram, Balaji Banoth, R K Subbarao Malireddi, Patrick Schreiner, Geoffrey Neale, Peter Vogel and Richard Webby, of St. Jude; and Evan Peter Williams, Lillian Zalduondo and Colleen Beth Jonsson.
Increased blood levels of multiple cytokines causes this infection. Further, immune cells, secrete these small proteins to put an end to this virus. In addition, a few cytokines trigger inflammation.
The phrase cytokine storm has been used to describe the dramatically elevated cytokine levels in the blood and other immune changes that have also been observed in Covid-19, sepsis and inflammatory disorders such as hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), St Jude’s said in a statement.
However, it is not for certain if specific pathways initiate the cytokine storm and inflammation, lung damage and organ failure in Covid-19.
A deep understanding about the cellular and molecular mechanisms that describes the cytokine storm was also lacking.
The team of researchers picked a set of the most elevated cytokines in Covid-19 patients. These scientists showed that no single cytokine induced cell death in innate immune cells.
“The findings link inflammatory cell death induced by TNF-alpha and IFN-gamma to Covid-19,” Kanneganti said.
“The results also suggest that therapies that target this cytokine combination are candidates for rapid clinical trials for treatment of not only Covid-19, but several other often fatal disorders associated with cytokine storm,” she said.
“We were excited to connect these dots to understand how TNF-alpha and IFN-gamma trigger PANoptosis,” said co-first author Rajendra Karki, a scientist in the Kanneganti laboratory.
“Indeed, understanding how PANoptosis contributes to disease and mortality is critical for identifying therapies,” added co-first author Bhesh Raj Sharma, a scientist in the Kanneganti laboratory.
