Personalized approach to COVID-19 infection through the analysis of the patients' genetic predisposition for a differential immunological response

SARS-CoV-2 is a single-stranded RNA virus that consists of 29, 881 nucleotides andcauses COVID-19 disease. COVID-19 represents a world-wide epidemic that hasserious impact on health care system and economics on every country because of the virus epidemiological features, as well as the variety of symptoms it causes.Environmental, social and clinical factor have impact on severity of COVID-19disease symptoms, but that the host genetics may also have a role in the severity of clinical symptoms of the disease. Published data suggest that patients genetic make-up can contribute to insight of the disease and possibly identify theraputeic targets.Gene panel comprised of 16 genes was designed for IonTorrent S5 GeneStudio.MiSeq Illumina platform was used as an additional next generation sequencingmethodology. Comprehensive bioinformatical data was performed, and based on the data, primers for Sanger sequencing were designed for confirmational sequencing. Chi-square test of goodness-of-fit was used to compare clinical severity between male and female participants, and to compare clinical severity between patients with different comorbidities (cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory and other comorbidities). One-way anova was used to compare mean age among the different clinical severity groups.Large number of variants was found and analyzed genes and p-values werecalculated for three determined groups: light, moderate and severe. Variants thatconfer susceptibility to COVID-19 have been identified, as well as the statisticaldifference in frequency in detected variants. Detected variants should be furtherlyprocessed and analyzed on the greater number of samples. Based on our results, there are many possibilities for further research: clinical exome study and softwarebioinformatical analysis on a larger study group and Sanger sequencing on variantsof interest on a greater number of samples. In the end, our research showed variants that could be used for personalized treatment of COVID-19 using cost-effective real- time PCR methodology.