Hacker News Reader

"Flower lose, a cell fitness marker, predicts COVID-19 prognosis",

by Michail Yekelchyk, Esha Madan, Jochen Wilhelm, Kirsty R Short, António M Palma,…, Rajan Gogna

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.202013714 (Open Access)

Interesting that the biomarker does not interact specifically with SarsCov2, in fact it is a general stress biomarker. Therefore , even though this will be used to prognose higher-risk-patients, it's not clear if one could use it to treat covid by manipulating the marker.

You can treat it with monoclonal antibodies (or even that and remdesivir, if you are willing to hospitalize the person right away, before they develop inflammatory symptoms), so I'm not sure why you would even want to pursue something like that even if you could.

Such a test could be used to focus efforts on higher risk patients, e.g. by giving them risk reducing medication like Paxlovid.

Yeah this medication is usually not available in large quantities, so you can't give it to everyone. So any type of marker is going to be very helpful to you because you can target it to those whose outcomes you can improve the most with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com