Mount Sinai researchers have found an important clue to a rare but serious aftereffect of COVID-19 in children, known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children or MIS-C.
The researchers reported that RNA sequencing of blood samples from the Mount Sinai COVID-19 Biobank led to the discovery that specific infection-fighting cells of the immune system are downregulated in children with MIS-C, and that this is associated with a sustained inflammatory response, a hallmark of infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The study was published in Nature Communications on August 11.
MIS-C is characterized by fever, pain, and inflammation of multiple organs including the heart, lungs, kidneys, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal tract. More than 2,600 cases of MIS-C have been reported in the United States since the COVID-19 pandemic began. While an autoimmune condition has been suggested as an underlying cause, specific genes, pathways, and cell types remain unknown. Through Mount Sinai’s extensive gene-expression study, the researchers have taken a significant step in providing the field with new exploratory pathways involving complex networks and subnetworks of genes they constructed from pediatric cases of MIS-C and COVID-19 from the Mount Sinai COVID-19 Biobank.
One of the more significant of these gene networks implicated the suppression of two types of immune cells: natural killer (NK) cells and CD8+ T cells. Previous research has shown that when CD8+ T cells are persistently exposed to pathogens, they enter a state of “exhaustion,” resulting in a loss of their effectiveness and ability to proliferate. The researchers in the new study specifically pointed to the CD8+ T cells being in this exhausted state, thus potentially weakening the inflammatory immune response. An increase in NK cells is also associated with exhausted CD8+ T cells.
