They discover a mysterious, potentially fatal illness linked to Covid.

“He told me that mild cases of Covid were being seen. They have vaccinated around 90 per cent of Yorkshire’s population but are now seeing a very rare autoimmune disease called MDA5“Autoantibody-associated dermatomyositis (DM) in patients who may or may not have been exposed to Covid, or do not even remember whether they were exposed to Covid,” says Ghosh.

McGonagle told him about patients with severe scarring in their lungs, some of whom had the rheumatologic symptoms (skin rash, arthritis, muscle pain) that often accompany interstitial lung disease. I was curious if there was a link between MDA5-positive dermatomyositis and Covid-19.

“DM is more common in people of Asian descent, especially Japanese and Chinese. However, Dr. McGonagle noticed this explosive trend among Caucasians,” recalls Ghosh. But the most serious thing was that Some of these patients progressed rapidly to death..

Ghosh is also the founding director of the Institute for Networked Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, which is home to the Precision Computing Systems Network Center (PreCSN, the Institute for Networked Medicine’s computing center). PreCSN’s signature asset is BoNE (Boolean Network Explorer), a powerful computing framework for extracting useful information from any form of big data.

“BoNE is designed to ignore factors that differentiate patients in a group, while selectively identifying what is common (common) among all members of the group,” explains Ghosh. Previous applications of BoNE have already enabled Ghosh and his team to identify other Covid-related pulmonary and cardiac syndromes in adults and children, respectively.

As a rheumatologist, McGonagle specializes in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Their expertise, combined with the computing power of the Institute for Networked Medicine, has proven to be an excellent collaboration in researching the post-pandemic rise in inflammatory and autoimmune diagnoses. Ghosh said McGonagle’s list of patients, all of whom were part of the UK’s National Health System (NHS), helped facilitate the investigation. “The National Health Service has a centralized health database with complete health records for a large population, making it easier to access and analyze health data for research purposes,” says Ghosh.

Gauche and McGonagle investigated and discovered that they were, in fact, facing completely new syndrome.

The research began with the discovery in McGonagle’s laboratory of autoantibodies against MDA5, an RNA-sensing enzyme whose function is to detect Covid-19 and other RNA viruses. Just 25 patients in the group of 60 developed lung scarring, also known as interstitial lung disease. Ghosh notes that the scars on the lungs were severe enough that cause the death of eight people group due to progressive fibrosis.

While there are established clinical profiles of MDA5 autoimmune diseases, “they differed in behavior and rate of progression, as well as in the number of deaths,” says Ghosh, who along with the UC San Diego team examined McGonagle’s data with BoNE. They found that patients who showed the highest levels of MDA5 response also had high levels of interleukin-15.

“Interleukin-15 is a cytokine that can trigger two main types of immune cells. “They can push cells to the brink of exhaustion and create an immune phenotype that is very often seen as a sign of advanced interstitial lung disease or pulmonary fibrosis,” he explains.

BoNE allowed the team to identify the cause of Yorkshire syndrome. By virtue of the discovery, the group was able to name the disease: MDA5 autoimmunity and interstitial pneumonitis accompanying Covid-19. Abbreviated MIP-C, “pronounced meepsy,” says Ghosh, who says the name was coined to make a connection with MIS-C (childhood multisystem inflammatory syndrome), a childhood disease also associated with Covid.

According to Ghosh, it is highly unlikely that MIP-C will be limited to the UK because Symptoms are being reported from all over the world. He hopes the discovery of interleukin-15 as a causal link will spur research into treatments.