Irish scientists on quest to discover why some people don't get Covid-19 

A global consortium of scientists has already discovered how variation in some immune genes contributes to severe Covid infection.

Irish scientists are among a global group hunting for a genetic explanation as to why some people seem resistant to Covid-19 while others experience life-threatening symptoms. 

In a landmark paper published on Monday in leading journal  Nature Immunology, the consortium sets out a strategy for answering one of the pandemic’s greatest questions: Why do some people not get Covid?

The Covid Human Genome Effort, (COVIDHGE) is led by Jean Laurent Casanova of the Rockefeller Institute in New York and Helen Su of the National Institutes of Health in the US. 

Teams from over 50 countries, including one from Trinity College Dublin, are working on it.

The COVIDHGE scientists will, over the next 12 months, seek people who seem naturally resistant to Covid (having been exposed, in close quarters, and for a significant time to an infected person) and compare their genetic — and other biological — profiles with those of non-resistant people who become infected.

In doing so, they will hunt for genetic answers that could explain why some people are resistant and others not, and by extension, make a global impact in fighting the virus.

The consortium has already discovered how variation in some immune genes contributes to severe Covid infection.

Now it wants to find the genes responsible for why some people are resistant to Covid. 

The Irish group, led by Cliona O’Farrelly, Professor of Comparative Immunology at TCD, is now supported by Science Foundation Ireland to contribute to the global effort.

Professor O’Farrelly, whose team is based in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute and who collaborates with clinicians and scientists in St James’s Hospital, said: “There is a growing awareness that many people seem to have innate immune-mediated resistance to viral infections." 

Due to previous work, Prof O'Farrelly has done on people exposed to hepatitis C and current information on people's "wildly" different responses to Covid, she said that her team "are convinced that a proportion of the population is resistant to the virus".