While the world continues fighting against COVID-19 pandemic, still SARS- CoV-2 virus and its variants evolution raises great concerns on its possible future infectivity, disease severity and vaccine efficacy.
Ulisse BioMed is the owner of an international patent application about usage of albumin in COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics, that could be relevant also on other pathogens.
Last week, an important step forward in this research has been recently taken by the joint effort of Ulisse BioMed scientific team in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of scientists and physicians composed by University of Trieste, Roma Tre University and “Città della salute e della Scienza” University Hospital of Turin.
Indeed, it was initially observed that the blood levels of albumin, the most abundant circulating protein in the plasma, were particularly low in critically ill patients affected by COVID-19 pneumonia. This prompted the scientific team to start a prospective longitudinal study aiming to verify and characterize the possible impact of serum albumin levels on COVID-19 mortality; the study, recently published in the Infectious Disease Report journal1, was presented by dr. Zerbato (University of Trieste) to the international scientific community at the most important event in this field, the 32nd European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Disease (ECCMID 2022), held in Lisbon (Portugal) from 23rd to 26th April 2022.
Precise quantitation of albumin in 864 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 pneumonia from March 2020 to June 2021, allowed to prove that hypoalbuminemia correlates with poor outcomes in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with pneumonia. This study shed more light about how the finding of novel biomarkers could help to develop personalized patient’s management strategies to achieve therapeutic benefits in a cost-effective and tailored manner. Therefore, an easy assay from a blood drop allowing to measure serum albumin levels could be valuable to predict the risk of severe respiratory failure, longer hospital stay and the risk of death in hospitalized adult patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.
Interestingly, albumin, a protein that appears act as universal protection barrier against pathogen2,3, could be exploited both in diagnostic and prognostic tools, as well as employed for therapeutic purposes, not only to SARS-CoV-2 and other relevant infections management, but also in future for emerging, unknown viruses – as is described in the Ulisse BioMed patent.
References
- Zerbato et al. The Impact of Serum Albumin Levels on COVID-19 Mortality. Infect. Dis. Rep. 2022, 14(3), 278-286. https://doi.org/10.3390/idr14030034
- Di Masi et al. Human Serum Albumin Is an Essential Component of the Host Defense Mechanism Against Clostridium difficile Intoxication. J Infect Dis 2018 Sep 22;218(9):1424-1435. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiy338
- Di Bella et al. The Protective Role of Albumin in Clostridium difficile Infection: A Step Toward Solving the Puzzle. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2015 Dec;36(12):1478-9. https://doi.org/10.1017/ice.2015.221