Interleukin-8 as a Biomarker for Disease Prognosis of Coronavirus Disease-2019 Patients.

Lili Li,Xin Xu,Feng Ma,Huimin Fan,Chunfeng Chen,Meiling Gao,Genhong Cheng,Minxin Shi,Jie Li,Yanan Wang,Jicai Zhang,Heng Yang,Jocelyn Kim,Junxiao Liu,Xiaorong Li,Roghiyh Aliyari,Yujie Jin

doi:10.3389/fimmu.2020.602395

Abstract

The widespread prevalence of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) which is caused by severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, has resulted in a severe global public health emergency. However, there are no sensitive biomarkers to predict the disease prognosis of COVID-19 patients. Here, we have identified interleukin-8 (IL-8) as a biomarker candidate to predict different disease severity and prognosis of COVID-19 patients. While serum IL-6 become obviously elevated in severe COVID-19 patients, serum IL-8 was easily detectible in COVID-19 patients with mild syndromes. Furthermore, lL-8 levels correlated better than IL-6 levels with the overall clinical disease scores at different stages of the same COVID-19 patients. Thus, our studies suggest that IL-6 and IL-8 can be respectively used as biomarkers for severe COVID-19 patients and for COVID-19 disease prognosis.

Highlights

Since the initial outbreak in December of 2019, severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) infection and its associated coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has quickly developed into a global epidemic [1,2,3], causing over 70 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 1.6 million associated deaths [2, 4,5,6]
Serum samples were collected from these patients at their severe and recovered status, except for patient 4# who was dead from COVID-19 and one serum sample was obtained before the death of the patient (Patient 4# death)
Besides IL-6, which has been reported as a potential biomarker for COVID-19 patients [28, 40], we found that both IL-6 and IL-8 serum levels were elevated in COVID-19 patients with severe diseases

Summary

Introduction

Since the initial outbreak in December of 2019, severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) infection and its associated coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has quickly developed into a global epidemic [1,2,3], causing over 70 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 1.6 million associated deaths [2, 4,5,6]. SARS-CoV-2 is a novel betacoronavirus belonging to the large coronavirus family. The coronavirus family includes Alphacoronavirus [i.e. Human coronavirus 229E, Human coronavirus NL63), Betacoronavirus (SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Human coronavirus OC43), Gammacoronavirus (Avian coronavirus (IBV)], and Deltacoronavirus [Bulbul coronavirus HKU11 (Bulbul-CoV HKU11)] [7, 8]. In the past two decades, two large scale pandemics have been caused by coronavirus, SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012 [9, 10]. SARS-CoV-2 infection was firstly reported at the end of 2019 and rapidly spread across the world in a few months, posing a major threat to the health of people around the world.

Methods

Results

Conclusion