The consumer genetics giants Ancestry.com and 23andMe are getting involved. 23andMe recently released preliminary findings showing that people with Type O blood are 9 to 18 percent less likely to test positive for covid-19 than people with other blood types. The company is still exploring links between blood type and disease severity.
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More than 750,000 of the company’s customers have completed a web-based survey about their experiences with covid-19, and 2,000 of them said they’d been hospitalized from the disease. The company is now recruiting 10,000 non-customers who have been hospitalized with covid-19.
“It would be very nice if there was a single gene that we could understand as conferring different levels of risk for covid-19,” said Adam Auton, 23andMe’s principal scientist. “In reality, dozens or hundreds or even thousands of genes are all making very small contributions toward disease risk.”
Jean-Laurent Casanova, head of the St. Giles Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases at Rockefeller University, is co-leading an international team searching the genomes of “outliers” — patients younger than 50 who had no known preexisting conditions, but were hospitalized with life-threatening cases of covid-19. They’re looking for unusual gene variants that these patients have in common.