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- Researchers have found thirteen parts of the genetic code linked to susceptibility to COVID-19.
- Scientists compared 500,000 genes from people with COVID-19 and 2 million people who did not.
- Some genetic regions are linked to the immune response and others to your lungs.
- See more stories on the Insider business page.
Variations in at least 13 parts of the genetic code can make us more susceptible to COVID-19, an international research team has found.
The COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative, a collaboration of more than 3,000 scientists from 25 countries, found that variations in six regions of the genetic code were linked to severe COVID-19, and seven could make people more susceptible to it. catch the virus.
Researchers looked at 46 studies from 19 countries and compared the genetic code of about 50,000 people with COVID-19 with 2 million people who did not. People with COVID-19 have been divided into three groups based on the severity of their illness.
Nine of the regions had a clear biological explanation – some related to the immune response and others to lung biology.
One region is associated with lung cancer and interstitial lung disease, and another with autoimmune diseases, hypothyroidism and rheumatoid arthritis, the authors wrote in an article published Thursday in Nature.
Read more: Experts explain why mRNA technology that revolutionized COVID-19 vaccines could be the answer to incurable diseases, heart attacks and even snakebites: “The possibilities are endless”
Andrea Ganna, a senior researcher at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland, who led the study, told Insider that “everyone is talking about the genome of the virus but the human genome matters.”
“Usually when performing a genetic analysis there is a lot of variation, but it is not clear what the genes do, so it is exciting to have plausible biological explanations for the observed differences.” , he said, adding that more work was needed.
Ganna said the work included under-represented countries such as Jordan, Iran, Latvia and Pakistan, which allowed the group to find genes linked to COVID-19 that they would not otherwise have . For example, two of the genetic regions identified by the group occurred in less than 3% of the European population in the dataset, but 32% of the East Asian population in the dataset.
Ganna said the group had now examined the genes of 125,000 people with COVID-19 and found 10 more variations in the genetic code linked to COVID-19, bringing the total to 23. One was the ACE-2 receptor COVID-19, the part of the human cell that the virus binds to, he said.
This part of the group’s research was not peer reviewed by experts.
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