Presented by

Dr. Houari B. Abdesselem

Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has sparked a global pandemic with severe complications and high morbidity rate. Neurological symptoms in COVID-19 patients, and neurological sequelae post COVID-19 recovery have been extensively reported. However, neurological molecular signature and signaling pathways that are affected in the central nervous system (CNS) of COVID-19 severe patients remain still unknown and need to be identified. Plasma samples from 49 severe COVID-19 patients, 50 mild COVID-19 patients, and 40 healthy controls were collected for Olink proteomics analysis of 184 CNS-enriched proteins. By using multi-approach bioinformatics analyses, we identified 34-neurological protein signature for COVID-19 severity and unveiled disrupted neurological pathways that were found either downregulated or upregulated in severe cases. Our findings provide new neurological protein signature for severe COVID-19 that we validated in different independent cohorts using blood and postmortem brain samples at both protein and RNA levels. The new protein signature can potentially contribute to the development of diagnostic tools for neurological complications in post COVID-19 convalescent patients with long term neurological sequelae.