During the early days of the pandemic, doctors were struggling to understand why a small fraction of kids who’d been infected with the COVID virus — and successfully fought it off — started suffering from severe inflammation and organ failure weeks later.
The condition, called MIS-C, has life-threatening consequences. The cause was a mystery until researchers made a groundbreaking discovery earlier this year. It turns out kids with MIS-C were producing antibodies and T cells that targeted not only the COVID virus, but also their own immune system.
There’s a fascinating story behind that discovery, and one of the keys to unlocking this mystery came from our San Francisco Biohub president, Joe DeRisi. He and a team of scientists had been using a tool to study antibodies called phage immunoprecipitation sequencing (PhIP-Seq). Scientists at UCSF and the San Francisco Biohub, in partnership with doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, used PhIP-Seq to discover the root causes of MIS-C. This discovery not only unraveled the MIS-C puzzle, but has now opened new avenues for understanding autoimmune diseases more broadly.
