Functional Immunophenotyping of Children with Critical Status Asthmaticus Identifies Differential Gene Expression Responses in Neutrophils Exposed to a Poly(I:C) Stimulus

We determined whether we could identify clusters of children with critical asthma by functional immunophenotyping using an intracellular viral analog stimulus. We performed a single-center, prospective, observational cohort study of 43 children ages 6 – 17 years admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit for an asthma attack between July 2019 to February 2021. Neutrophils were isolated from children, stimulated overnight with LyoVec poly(I:C), and mRNA was analyzed using a targeted Nanostring immunology array. Network analysis of the differentially expressed transcripts for the paired LyoVec poly(I:C) samples was performed.