Research teams have identified more than a dozen genetic variants statistically associated with a person's susceptibility to COVID-19 and their chances of developing severe infection, according to an analysis published July 8 in Nature..
The COVID-19 Hosts Genetics Initiative — the genomes-focused research effort involving research teams from both academic labs and private firms such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA — have been analyzing the genomes of tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients since last March.
The efforts led to the identification of 13 "areas of the genome that are statistically associated with susceptibilities to SARS-CoV-2 infection or severe illness," according to the summary report.
The teams found that increased susceptibility to COVID-9 or severity of infection ranges from 4 percent to 74 percent, depending on the genetic variant.
“There were actually quite a few very common genetic variants that were really important in COVID-19,” said Dr. Guillaume Butler-Laporte, an infectious-disease physician and genetic epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “I don’t think we expected to find them so clearly," he told Nature.
Some experts say the findings are just a starting point.
"To move that on to where we've got good drug targets or an understanding of disease variability, that's going to be a big step," Julian Knight, a human geneticist at the University of Oxford in the U.K., told the news outlet.