In an international study published last month in the journal Science, 10% of nearly 1,000 COVID-19 patients who developed life-threatening pneumonia had antibodies that disable key immune system proteins called interferons. For reasons that researchers don’t understand, the autoantibodies never caused a problem until patients were infected with COVID-19, Bastard said. AdvertisementIn yet another unexpected finding from the first study, 94% of patients with these autoantibodies were men. Screening patients for autoantibodies against interferons could help predict which patients are more likely to become very sick, Bastard said. In the industry-funded study, hospitalized COVID-19 patients randomly assigned to receive interferon beta-1a were more than twice as likely as others to recover enough to resume their regular activities.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 13, 2020 21:18 UTC