The disease-resistant patients exposing Covid-19’s weak spots - BBC Future
▻https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210219-the-covid-resistant-patients-e-the-viruss-weak-spots
Mayana Zatz, director of the Human Genome Research Centre at the University of São Paulo has identified 100 couples, where one person got #Covid-19 but their partner was not infected. Her team is now studying them in the hope of identifying genetic markers of resilience. “The idea is to try and find why some people who are heavily exposed to the virus do not develop Covid-19 and remain serum negative with no antibodies,” she says. “We found out that this is apparently relatively common. We received about 1,000 emails of people saying that they were in this situation.”
Zatz is also analysing the genomes of 12 centenarians who have only been mildly affected by the coronavirus, including one 114-year-old woman in Recife who she believes to be the oldest person in the world to have recovered from Covid-19. While Covid-19 has been particularly deadly to the older generations, elderly people who are remarkably resistant could offer clues for new ways to help the vulnerable survive future pandemics.
But while cases of remarkable resilience are particularly eye-catching for some geneticists, others are much more interested in outliers at the other end of the spectrum. Over the past couple of months, studies of these patients have already yielded key insights into exactly why the #Sars-CoV-2 virus can be so deadly.
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While many of these answers are coming too late to make much of a difference during the current pandemic, understanding what makes people unusually resilient or vulnerable will almost certainly save lives during future outbreaks. As the Sars, H1N1, Ebola, and Mers epidemics of the past 20 years have shown us, it is inevitable that novel viruses will continue to spill over from nature, making it all the more vital to develop new ways of identifying those most at risk, and ways to treat them.