NextGen Day

A group of researchers from around the world has uncovered a gene variant that protects against severe coronavirus illness 2019 (Covid-19) infections.

Researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, Canada’s Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital, and the United States’ VA Boston Healthcare System studied gene datasets from people of various ancestries, which they say “highlights the importance of conducting clinical trials that include people of diverse descents.”

The study, which was published in the journal Nature Genetics, looked at 2,787 hospitalized African-American Covid-19 patients and 130,997 participants in a control group from six cohort studies.

The study found that 80% of people of African descent carried the protective variation and then compared it to a prior study of people of European ancestry.

“The fact that people of African heritage had the same protection allowed us to pinpoint the specific DNA mutation that protects against Covid-19 infection,” said Jennifer Huffman, a researcher at the VA Boston Healthcare System and the study’s first author.

According to the researchers, the protective gene variant (rs10774671-G) regulates the length of the protein expressed by the gene OAS1.

Prior research has indicated that the protein’s longer form is more effective against severe Covid-19.

“This study demonstrates the importance of including people of various ancestries. “We would not have been successful in discovering the gene variant in this situation if we had just studied one group,” said Hugo Zeberg, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Neuroscience.

This finding is “essential to developing new medications against Covid-19,” according to a senior researcher and geneticist Brent Richards of McGill University in Canada.

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