A new research initiative will explore whether the persistence of coronavirus in the body plays a role in the development of long COVID, a poorly understood syndrome in which symptoms can last for months or even years following an infection.
The Long COVID Research Initiative will try to determine if SARS-CoV-2 is still present in those with long-haul symptoms and, if so, how it might be contributing to their ailments.
The endurance of the virus in the body is one of several potential root causes of long COVID being investigated by scientists. Others include the possibility that infection leads to blood-clotting issues that damage the circulatory system; that the coronavirus might destroy key tissues during the acute stage of an infection, leading to longer-lasting illness; and that the virus triggers an overactive immune response that results in harmful inflammation or prompts certain antibodies to attack a patient’s own cells.
But to microbiologist Amy Proal, chief science officer and co-founder of the Long COVID Research Initiative, viral reservoirs lingering in the body months or even years after an infection has cleared is “the most straightforward possibility for why patients still have symptoms and, in that sense, it’s also the possibility that should be first explored.”
Newsletter
Get our free Coronavirus Today newsletter
Sign up for the latest news, best stories and what they mean for you, plus answers to your questions.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
Proal noted that COVID-19 is adept at evolving ways to evade the immune system’s defenses. “If the immune system is not recognizing the virus,” she said, it’s hard to think “that it will fully clear.”
The new initiative, which was announced Wednesday night under the auspices of the PolyBio Research Foundation in Medford, Mass., will fund projects from researchers at UC San Francisco, Stanford,…