At the start of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began, the worst medical and economical emergency the world has experienced, and to date a death toll of nearly 7 million. We used the DIRE (DIffusional and Relaxation Editing) and developed the new JEDI NMR experiment, where the spectral signature unveiled the role of glycoproteins during infection and resulted in the identification of a new High-Fidelity Supramolecular Phospholipid Composite Signature, SPC. The JEDI experiment allowed for direct quantification of the glycoproteins and SPC and it was demonstrated with a small COVID-19 cohort that using these experiments covid positive patients could be differentiated from healthy controls with 100% accuracy.
To date over 10,000 samples have now been analysed by these new NMR experiments from studies including pregnant women, COVID-19 infection, cardiovascular disease, burns patients and large population cohorts. We have now ascertained that both the glycoproteins and SPC are influenced by age, gender and BMI. In addition, SPC has been fully characterised and found to have three distinct regions SPC1, SPC2 and SPC3. While the glycoprotein levels increase with inflammation, the different regions of SPC change differentially giving insight into the presence of both chronic and acute inflammation. In addition, we have shown that the SPC3/SPC2 ratio is highly correlated with the apolipoprotein B100/A1 ratio (ABA1), a metric used as a marker of atherogenicity and increased cardiovascular risk.
These data indicate the considerable potential of using SPC as a metric of inflammatory status and cardiovascular risk based on a single NMR experiment (JEDI), which if used on an 80MHz NMR instrument has an analysis time of 1 minute. We have shown that the DIRE and JEDI are an improved approach to selectively investigate inflammatory signals in serum and plasma and may have widespread diagnostic applicability to disease states associated with systemic inflammation.