SARS-CoV-2 infection results in immune responses in the respiratory tract and peripheral blood that suggest mechanisms of disease severity

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

We acknowledge all DRASTIC (The use of cytokines as a preDictoR of disease Severity in criTically Ill COVID-19) investigators from Austin Health, and thank the participants involved. This project obtained samples from the COVID-19 Biobank based at the Alfred Hospital and acknowledge all its investigators and the participants who contributed samples. We acknowledge Janine Roney's support for this work and funding from the Lord Mayor's Charitable Foundation and the Ray William Houston Trust. This research included samples and data from the Sentinel Travelers Research Preparedness Platform for Emerging Infectious Diseases (SETREP-ID). We acknowledge all SETREP-ID investigators and sites, and thank all participants involved. The authors thank Barbara Scher for setting up the ethics and governance for the SETREP-ID platform and the Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research for Infectious Disease Emergencies (APPRISE) for ongoing funding of SETREP-ID, Ajantha Rhodes, Judy Chang, Ashanti Dantanarayana and Rosalyn Cao who contributed to the SETREP-ID biobank. SETREP-ID is supported by funding through the National Health and Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence (NHMRC CRE), the Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies (APPRISE AppID 1116530), the Snow Medical Foundation, the Jack Ma Foundation and the A2 Milk Company. We thank Austin Health Foundation for support of the study. We acknowledge Francesca L. Mordant and Kanta Subbarao for their contributions to the microneutralization assay. We acknowledge Adam K. Wheatley for kindly providing SARS-CoV-2 and HKU-1 spike trimers and Bruce D. Wines and P. Mark Hogarth for kindly providing Fc gamma R dimers. The RBD proteins were produced under HHSN272201400008C and obtained through BEI Resources, NIAID, NIH: Spike Glycoprotein RBD from SARS-Related Coronavirus 2, Wuhan-Hu-1 with C-Terminal Histidine Tag, Recombinant from HEK293F Cells, NR-52366. We thank the staff at the diagnostic microbiology laboratories at Austin Pathology, Melbourne Pathology, Dorevitch Pathology, 4Cyte Pathology, Microbiological Diagnostic Unit Public Health Laboratory, Northern Pathology Victoria, Eastern Health Pathology for performing initial diagnostic testing for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid. We acknowledge Bridie Clemens for reviewing our manuscript. This work was supported by the NHMRC Leadership Investigator Grant to KK (#1173871), Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (#T11-712/19-N) to KK, the MRFF Award (#1202445) to KK and AWC, NIH contract CIVC-HRP (HHS-NIH-NIAID-BAA2018) to PGT and KK, NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellowship (#1117766) to DIG, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Level 1 Investigator Grant to THON (#1194036) and NHMRC Early Career Fellowships to HFK (#1160333), CLG (#1160963) and JAT (#1139902). PGT is supported by NIH NIAID R01 AI136514-03 and ALSAC at St. Jude. WZ and JRH are supported by the Melbourne Research Scholarship from The University of Melbourne. LH is supported by the Melbourne International Research Scholarship (MIRS) and the Melbourne International Fee Remission Scholarship (MIFRS) from The University of Melbourne. We acknowledge the Melbourne Cytometry Platform (Peter Doherty Institute and Melbourne Brain Centre nodes) for provision of flow cytometry services.