Deep mass spectrometry analysis of plasma samples from Covid-19 patients

It is highly likely that SARS-CoV-2 will cause unprecedented changes in our society. Despite the worldwide efforts to contain the spread of the disease, we have failed to control it sufficiently. This can be partly attributed to our poor understanding of why COVID-19 causes mild symptoms in one patient but is deadly in others. We are proposing to apply our expertise in mass spectrometry and computational biology to tackle this issue by identifying markers of SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease severity. We hypothesise that assessing the composition of plasma from patients with COVID-19 will generate information about the biological changes caused by the infection and will identify molecular markers that can be applied to stratify patients into risk groups. Samples are collected by the ISARIC-4C consortium, one of the UK group of experts responsible for the management of the pandemic. We will profile blood plasma from 120 COVID-19 patients with moderate to severe disease as well as non-infected and preepidemic control subjects from the Generation Scotland biobank (GS).We believe that analysing the whole range of molecules present in plasma will enable to identify compounds that change in the disease, broadly generating the information required to benefit patients.