JCI Insight (Jun 2023)

Autoantigen profiling reveals a shared post-COVID signature in fully recovered and long COVID patients

  • Aaron Bodansky,
  • Chung-Yu Wang,
  • Aditi Saxena,
  • Anthea Mitchell,
  • Andrew F. Kung,
  • Saki Takahashi,
  • Khamal Anglin,
  • Beatrice Huang,
  • Rebecca Hoh,
  • Scott Lu,
  • Sarah A. Goldberg,
  • Justin Romero,
  • Brandon Tran,
  • Raushun Kirtikar,
  • Halle Grebe,
  • Matthew So,
  • Bryan Greenhouse,
  • Matthew S. Durstenfeld,
  • Priscilla Y. Hsue,
  • Joanna Hellmuth,
  • J. Daniel Kelly,
  • Jeffrey N. Martin,
  • Mark S. Anderson,
  • Steven G. Deeks,
  • Timothy J. Henrich,
  • Joseph L. DeRisi,
  • Michael J. Peluso

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 11

Abstract

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Some individuals do not return to baseline health following SARS-CoV-2 infection, leading to a condition known as long COVID. The underlying pathophysiology of long COVID remains unknown. Given that autoantibodies have been found to play a role in severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection and certain other post-COVID sequelae, their potential role in long COVID is important to investigate. Here, we apply a well-established, unbiased, proteome-wide autoantibody detection technology (T7 phage-display assay with immunoprecipitation and next-generation sequencing, PhIP-Seq) to a robustly phenotyped cohort of 121 individuals with long COVID, 64 individuals with prior COVID-19 who reported full recovery, and 57 pre-COVID controls. While a distinct autoreactive signature was detected that separated individuals with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection from those never exposed to SARS-CoV-2, we did not detect patterns of autoreactivity that separated individuals with long COVID from individuals fully recovered from COVID-19. These data suggest that there are robust alterations in autoreactive antibody profiles due to infection; however, no association of autoreactive antibodies and long COVID was apparent by this assay.

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