Nanostring plasma microRNA profiling in hospitalised patients with COVID-19

Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to be excellent disease diagnostic or prognostic biomarkers in a wide range of chronic and acute inflammatory and infectious diseases including viral respiratory infection. Crucially, circulating miRNA levels are thought to reflect the state of the diseased tissue. Despite their proven value as mechanism-based clinical stratification indicators, miRNAs have only started being explored in the context of COVID-19. here, we aimed to explore whether integrating miRNA with other clinical and biological measurements would reveal more accurate correlates of COVID-19 severity and outcome, and to identify severity-specific correlations of miRNAs with COVID-19-associated inflammatory mediators, clinical parameters, and otucome. We determined 171 microRNA profiles from 58 hospitalised COVID-19 patients using the Nanostring miRNA v3 platform. RNA was from 800μl plasma using the Norgen Plasma/Serum RNA Purification Midi kit (Norgen, Cat #56100). A spike-in non-human miRNA (osa-miR-414) was added to each sample (5μl from a 200 pM per sample) for normalisation.