Comparative in vitro transcriptomic analyses of COVID-19 candidate therapy hydroxychloroquine suggest limited immunomodulatory evidence of SARS-CoV-2 host response genes.

Michael Jay Corley; Christopher Sugai; Michael Schotsaert; Robert E. Schwartz; Lishomwa C Ndhlovu

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.13.039263 doi: bioRxiv preprint the relative fraction of neutrophils was 23% and 13% in COVID-19 lung compared to 0% and 8% for the uninfected lung. These results support the notion of continual neutrophil influx into the lung in the setting of COVID-19 during sustained and persistent inflammatory cytokine and chemokine secretion [31] . Lastly, in support of the possibility of mast cell activation in severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection, we observed that the relative fraction of mast cells activated was 59% and 45% in COVID-19 lung compared to 37% and 0% for uninfected. While these results are limited by the low sample size, they do provide evidence for certain areas of future investigation. We suspect that transcriptome data from HCQ-treated COVID-19 individual's lung is needed to conclude that HCQ does not dramatically restore SARS-CoV-2 induced lung transcriptome alterations.