Researchers at the University of California – San Diego have discovered that a post-COVID lung illness has similar origins with other damaging lung diseases.
The new study released on Wednesday finds that the similar origins between post-COVID lung infection and other diseases could pave the way for effective therapy.
As most people around the world tend to recovery effectively quick from COVID, there is a one-third of COVID survivors who still experience symptoms weeks or weeks after their initial contraction of the virus.
In this study published Wednesday, scientists revealed they've found that COVID-19 causes lung fibrosis, which resembles one of the deadliest forms of Interstitial lung disease.
“Using an artificial intelligence approach, we found that lung fibrosis caused by COVID-19 resembles idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the most common and the deadliest form of ILD,” said co-senior study author Dr. Pradipta Ghosh, professor in the departments of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UCSD School of Medicine. “At a fundamental level, both conditions display similar gene expression patterns in the lungs and blood, and dysfunctional processes within alveolar type II cells.”
According to these findings, the AT2 cells play various roles in the pulmonary system, including the making of lung surfactant which prevents cells from collapse after suffering damage.
The co-senior study author Dr. Pradipta Ghosh said that these findings are valuable for the following reason:
“The findings are insightful because AT2 cells are known to contain an elegant quality control network that responds to stress, internal or external,” Ghosh said. “Failure of quality control leads to broader organ dysfunction and, in this case, fibrotic remodeling of the lung.”
Dr. Gosh conducted this study along with co-author Debashis Sahoo, associate professor in the departments of Computer Science, Engineering and Pediatrics at UCSD, and they say that this study will help them navigating the unanswered questions in regarding to the emerging post-pandemic lung disease.
To conduct this study, both professional analyzed over a thousand human lung datasets that have suffered different lung conditions, where they looking for inflammation indications and other cellular turnarounds.
