Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Jennifer Lund and her colleagues at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center set out to study how the human immune system reacts to this new coronavirus.
They began seeking what they call the “immune signature” in blood samples of patients who were seriously ill with COVID-19. The hope was to find a telltale pattern in how different components of the immune system react to the coronavirus and then compare that signature to those of influenza and RSV, two common, often harmful respiratory viruses.
