Jenny Ting, PhD (Distinguished Professor) and Bev Koller, PhD (Associate Professor) received a new R01 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for their project titled “Role and mitigation of inflammasomes and inflammation during COVID-19”.
Single cell RNAseq data from COVID-19 patients show dramatic increases of inflammasome sensors in the bronchial alveolar lavage of severe COVID-19 patients. There also exists a bidirectional feed-forward loop of inflammasome activation and inflammatory cytokine induction involving myeloid cells and airway stromal cells. This proposal will test the hypothesis that this two-way amplification loop is important in COVID-19.