Network analysis of host response to SARS-CoV-2 reveals a new set of genes with therapeutic and long term implications for COVID-19 disease.
Alisa Pavel, Giusy del Giudice, Antonio Federico, A. Di Lieto, Pia Kinaret, Angela Serra, Dario Greco · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2020
The COVID-19 disease led to an unprecedented health emergency, still ongoing worldwide. Given the lack of a vaccine or a clear therapeutic strategy to counteract the infection as well as its secondary effects, there is currently a pressing need to generate new insights into the SARS-CoV-2 induced host response. Biomedical data can help to investigate new aspects of the COVID-19 pathogenesis, but source heterogeneity represents a major drawback and limitation. In this work, we apply data integration methods to develop a Unified Knowledge Space (UKS) and use it to identify a new set of genes associated with SARS-CoV-2 host response, both in vitro and in vivo. Functional analysis of these genes reveals possible long term systemic effects of the infection, such as vascular remodelling and fibrosis. Finally, we identified a set of potentially interesting drugs targeting proteins involved in multiple steps of the host response to the virus.