How COVID-19 and other pathological conditions and medical treatments activate our intravascular innate immune system

Bo Nilsson; Oskar Eriksson; Karin Fromell; Barbro Persson; Kristina N Ekdahl

doi:10.3389/fimmu.2022.1030627

How COVID-19 and other pathological conditions and medical treatments activate our intravascular innate immune system

Front Immunol. 2023 Feb 3:13:1030627. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2022.1030627. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Bo Nilsson¹, Oskar Eriksson¹, Karin Fromell¹, Barbro Persson¹, Kristina N Ekdahl^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology (IGP), Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
² Linnæus Center of Biomaterials Chemistry, Linnæus University, Kalmar, Sweden.

Abstract

COVID-19 has been shown to have a multifaceted impact on the immune system. In a recently published article in Front Immunol, we show that the intravascular innate immune system (IIIS) is strongly activated in severe COVID-19 with ARDS and appears to be one of the causes leading to severe COVID-19. In this article, we describe the IIIS and its physiological function, but also the strong pro-inflammatory effects that are observed in COVID-19 and in various other pathological conditions and treatments such as during ischemia reperfusion injury and in treatments where biomaterials come in direct contact with blood in, e.g., extracorporeal and intravasal treatments. In the present article, we describe how the IIIS, a complex network of plasma proteins and blood cells, constitute the acute innate immune response of the blood and discuss the effects that the IIIS induces in pathological disorders and treatments in modern medicine.

Keywords: blood cascade systems; cross talk; intravascular innate immune system; leukocytes; platelets.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

COVID-19*
Humans
Immune System
Immunity, Innate

Grants and funding

The study was funded by the Swedish Research Council grants 2016-01060, 2016-04519, 2020-05762, 2021-02252, the Swedish Heart-Lung foundation grant 202-0398, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research; project SBE13-0028 “Strategies for stem cell survival” and by faculty grants from the Linneus University.