Q&A: COVID-19 study to phenotype degree of multiorgan injury in recovering patients
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During this COVID-19 pandemic, many scientists have turned their efforts to find either a treatment or vaccine for the infection or trying to better understand the infection.
In a recent release, Perspectum announced they launched the CoverScan study, the first study that will determine how COVID-19 impacts the health of multiple organs and to identify at-risk features in patients recovering from this virus. Their objective is to determine the degree of lung, heart, kidney, liver, pancreas and spleen injury in patients who are recovering from COVID-19. They will be using MRIs, blood tests, physical measurements and online questionnaires. Additionally, Perspectum will evaluate the change in multiple organs and whether genetic traits impact a patient’s recovery from COVID-19.
Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease spoke with Rajarshi Banerjee, BMBCh, MRCP, DPhil, CEO of Perspectum and principal investigator of the study to discuss the layout of CoverScan and what Perspectum hopes to accomplish with the results. – by Monica Jaramillo
Healio: Can you speak to the Cover Scan study Perspectum has launched?
Banerjee: Perspectum is an Oxford Head Quartered company with offices in Singapore, Dallas and San Francisco. When COVID-19 broke we started social distancing and all Perpsectum employees have been working from home since March 11th.
A lot of people asked what we could do to help. Could we help process CT scans? The radiology community has looked at CT scans on patients with COVID-19 and has done great work in giving their guidance on how to interpret them. We looked at our success at being able to phenotype obesity and inflammation, and our work looking at diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that many of the patients who are being discharged now were hospitalized for cytokine storm and multiorgan inflammation, including the kidney, liver, heart, pancreas and lungs.
So, Perpesectum can help by phenotyping them and determining the burden of disease in these patients. We decided to conduct this study on patients discharged from hospitals. We will see them a week or two afterwards, image their organs and conduct blood tests to determine the burden of disease. This will give us useful data. As a medical community, we are getting a lot of data about the risk factors for severe disease and drugs that might improve prognosis once you get COVID-19. However, what we don’t know is the burden of disease in people who get discharged. Who had severe disease in their organs? How are their kidneys doing? How is their heart doing? So that is what we are doing with this study. It was granted priority ethical approval as 'High priority COVID-19 Urgent Public Health Research' in the UK.
Healio: What types of patients have you recruited for this study?
Banerjee: We will take everyone with confirmed COVID-19. We plan to recruit over 500 patients in 6 months. The study will open on April 28th. Ethical approval has been received, so we are doing a dry run before we start.
There are many potential outcomes from this, it may determine that people recover completely from COVID-19 and there is no need to worry. You might not need medicine if you have had severe disease and then get discharged. That’s at the optimistic end of the spectrum. At the pessimistic end of the spectrum, patients who are coming out with severe multiorgan damage may or may not recover over time. Separate studies are needed to work out what causes that and what is needed to speed up recovery if at all possible. The initial thing we need to do is phenotype people and work out what is happening after COVID-19 strikes. Before figuring out how to treat the kidney disease COVID-19 causes, why don’t we figure out how many people develop kidney disease after COVID-19 and determine whether they had prior kidney disease or not?
Further, understanding obesity and inflammation will be central to working out how to best manage COVID-19. It’s not just infectious disease and imaging experts that need to be involved but also experts involved with underlying inflammation. Precision medicine that can be delivered in a safe environment that minimizes physical contact and close person-to-person interactions now have value to all of us. People who are not familiar with the latest techniques should become familiar because it’s safer for their patients.
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Disclosures: Banerjee reports he is the CEO of and is a stakeholder in Perspectum.