In many of the sickest patients with COVID-19, it seems the worst damage may be driven by a deranged immune response to the infection, called a cytokine storm, rather than the virus itself.
Though the virus that causes COVID-19 has been circulating for only a few months, early research shows that like other infections, it, too, may cause this kind of catastrophic immune problem, and researchers say the size of the storm it triggers is gale-force.Dozens of studies have been launched to see whether drugs and devices that sop up cytokines, or prevent their release in the first place, may keep COVID-19 patients from dying.
Mukesh Kumar, PhD, is a virologist and immunologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He studies how the body responds to infections. In experiments in his high-security lab, he has been infecting cells and animals with SARS-CoV-2 to learn what happens.“That’s a lot of stress on the cell in a small amount of time,” Kumar says.
Certain kinds of cytokines trigger cell death. When you have many cells doing this at the same time, a lot of tissue can die. In COVID-19, that tissue is mostly in the
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