Hi, folks. No news on my personal struggle to get disability accommodations at work — it’s still going, I am terribly tired.
On something completely different, a new paper came out recently on SARS-CoV-2 and why it causes such weird autoimmune responses.
Here’s the link: www.pnas.org/…
And since I was lucky enough to have a chemistry PhD on hand (thanks, bro!), I think I can give a reasonable summary of the paper in layperson’s terms, which I had trouble finding elsewhere. All errors my own, of course — I’m very much not a chemist.
I think we all know that plastic breaks down, but the microplastics left behind can be just as problematic as a plastic bag or water bottle. Sometimes, they can even be worse, because since they’re so tiny, they can get everywhere — say, into your blood, lungs, and other systems.
In the same way, your immune system breaks SARS-CoV-2 down — but it leaves tiny “virus bits” behind. Because those bits are so tiny, they can get into parts of your body which are pretty well-defended against viruses themselves.
With most viruses, that doesn’t matter — but in COVID-19 specifically, the “virus bits” are actually a problem.
Normally, virus bits might collide occasionally, and sometimes those collisions might stick the bits together. Think of this as a toddler smashing two handfuls of Legos together — the odds that they’ll combine into ANYTHING, nevermind something specific, are quite low.
What’s special about SARS-CoV-2 is that the molecular structure of the “virus bits” means they collide much more often. With a hundred toddlers, or a million, they’ll eventually end up with the Lego Death Star. Like monkeys on typewriters, it’s all a matter of statistics.
The Death Star, here, is cathelicidin — your body’s “SOUND THE ALARMS, WE’RE BEING ATTACKED!” compound. Anything that looks enough like cathelicidin will make your immune system respond.
This might be why acute COVID-19 can cause a “cytokine storm”, the autoimmune reaction which can be so dangerous during initial infection.
Maybe even more interesting, this might be the main cause of long COVID.
With most other viruses, the “virus bits” are basically inert, so your immune system doesn’t prioritize clearing them out. They can stay in your body for a long time, getting everywhere — and at any random time, in any part of your body, they can collide and combine.
This would explain why the parts of the body affected by long COVID vary so wildly, from the brain to the toes. Like microplastics, they’re already in every part of your body; symptoms might just happen in the place that combination happened to occur.
It would also explain why long COVID symptoms can come and go, seemingly at random. Some people recover quickly, while others are still very sick years after infection.
All of that sounds pretty depressing, right? But understanding how this works is the first step toward treatment. Here are the exciting parts:
- These scientists have figured out how to recognize a dangerous coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2 based only on its structure. We can test a virus circulating in bats and know whether it’s likely to be a common cold or a killer — before it ever crosses into humans. That’s huge. It might apply to other viruses too, though this study focused on coronaviruses.
- If we know what causes long COVID, we might be able to test for it in the future, rather than just diagnosing based on symptoms. That would make it much easier for people to access treatment and accommodations.
- This might be the cause of other post-viral autoimmune conditions. These are more common than you’d think — for instance, chronic fatigue syndrome is thought to often be a post-viral syndrome. Scientists have spent decades trying to understand how these post-viral syndromes happen, and this is a major breakthrough.
- And maybe, just maybe, this will let us treat long COVID. This is always more complex than it sounds, but if we could somehow remove some of the “virus bits” from people’s systems, or make their bodies get rid of the “bits” — we might have a treatment for millions of people. Until now, we’ve only been able to treat symptoms, because we haven’t understood the cause. Maybe a real treatment is on the horizon.
Heady stuff!
My PhD brother also says that PNAS, the journal which published these results, is one of the most reputable and highly-regarded journals in organic chemistry — it’s “top of the line”. He also notes that this paper was submitted quite a long time before it was actually published, which says to him that there was a lot of peer review and investigation to make sure these results are accurate. We can probably believe in these results — they’ve been under a lot of scrutiny.
Fingers crossed, this will lead to some real progress.