A consideration of publication-derived immune-related associations in Coronavirus and related lung damaging diseases

Nophar Geifman; Anthony D Whetton

In examining the associations between cell types and cytokines, in PubMed abstracts linked to Coronavirus (but not SARS) and those linked to SARS, we found some differences that may point to aetiological differences between SARS-CoV and Coronaviruses more generally. Coronavirus-related abstracts had a significantly higher percentage of associations with Interferon-gamma, Interferon-beta, T-lymphocytes, and macrophages ( Figure 2 ). On the other hand, SARS-related abstracts had higher associations with C-X-C motif chemokine 10 (CXCL10), IL8, and alveolar macrophages; however, these were only marginally higher than B D A C the number of associations found in the Coronavirus-related corpus. When comparing these cytokine and cell occurrences to those in H5N1-related abstracts, some patterns are similar to those observed in the Coronavirus-related abstracts; specifically, similar rates of occurrences were observed for IFNb, TNFa, IL-18, and Granulocyte-Macrophage Colony Stimulating Factor (GMCSF), in all cases these were higher than in the SARS-related abstracts. On the other hand H5N1-related abstracts had similar rates of association for monocytes, CD8-positive, and CD4-positive T-lymphocytes to those in SARS, in all cases, lower than those in Coronavirus-related abstracts.