The new project uses advanced imaging of pets to study long Covid mechanisms

Using the imaging of total animals to better understand the long Covid disease is the goal of a new project at the University of California, Davis, in cooperation with UC San Francisco. The project is financed from a subsidy of $ 3.2 million within four years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

About 1 in 10 people who survived, a number of long symptoms are developing that can last from months to years. How these symptoms diverge are not fully known, but they were associated with activated T cells entering organs and tissues. Scientists also tied a long Covid with internal damage to the lining of blood vessels. These events can be related because the blood vessels become leaky when T cells are activated nearby, but they can also be accidental, because leaning blood vessels allow a larger number of immune cells to leave blood and enter the tissues.

Negar Omidvari, assistant to the scientist of the project at the UC Davis Biomedical Engineering Department and the main subsidy researcher, will use the emission technology of total emission tomography (PET), originally developed by professors Simon Cherry and Ramsey Studawi in UC Davis, and kinetic modeling to look for both patients.

Imaging the whole body

PET imaging usually uses short -term radioactive tags to measure metabolic activity inside the body. A conventional animal can also look at one organ or a segment of the body. The UExPLorer pet scanner developed in UC Davis can also imagine the whole body, giving a much more detailed picture of what is happening in the body.

OMIDVARI will cooperate with Cellsight Technologies Inc. from San Francisco to use the name tag ¹⁸F-ARAG, which specifically means activated T cells. Using dynamic PET imaging and sophisticated modeling, it intends to see how activated T cells collect in various organs at different times at which blood vessels are damaged and whether these processes are related.

If we can separate vascular damage from the presence of activated T cells in the tissue, we should be able to get a much better picture of what is happening. “

Negar Omidvari, assistant to the scientist of the project, UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering

The team will also check blood samples for tags inflammation and immune activation, which correlates with PET imaging data.

The study will cooperate with patients from the long Covid UCSF program (Liinc – a long -term impact of infection with new coronavirus) who will be scanned at the beginning, four and eight months. People who have fully recovered from Covid-19 and do not have other symptoms will be scanned as controls.