Role of host genetics in COVID-19 susceptibility and severity of infection

Novel Coronavirus 2019 SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection is a global pandemic disease that has severely affected the United States. Emerging data suggests that racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and African Americans (AA) are overrepresented among hospitalized patients. The clinical symptoms vary from mild in approximately 80% of cases to critically ill. Established risk factors are age, gender and several comorbidities including cancer. Many other factors in clinical severity remain unexplained. This proposal will leverage remnant biospecimens from laboratory-proven COVID-19 positive individuals at Quest Diagnostics, a national commercial laboratory that has performed over 3.75 million COVID-19 tests and has identified over 298,000 positive cases to date, to study host-genetics of COVID19. We expect to include >7500 samples with whole genome genotyping, performed in collaboration with intramural NCI. While there are no established predictors of severity, certain biomarkers from total blood count have been observed to correlate with worse outcomes. Several studies have reported the role of uncontrolled cytokine release to be correlated with poor outcome. We will incorporate biomarkers such as lymphocyte count, neutrophil count and other inflammation markers to develop a severity score. Using this severity score, we will classify individuals as having mild, severe or critical infection. Biospecimens with de-identified clinical data from Quest and vital status data from the National Death Index in the 28 days period from testing positive, will be utilized to determine whether host genetic factors modify COVID-19 outcomes. We will discover novel genetic variation and clonal hematopoiesis (CH) associated with infection severity, mortality and cytokine storm. Finally, we will compare these novel genetic biomarkers in a cancer cohort of 2,000 individuals from MSKCC to contrast COVID-19 specific outcomes in cancer care. This study represents one of the largest COVID-19 cohorts for genetic association studies. These data will be used to compare genetic diversity and the role it plays in COVID-19 severity and will add to the understanding of constitutional determinants of host immune response to mild and severe viral infection and inflammation.