U.S. hospital to conduct pediatric disease modeling for long COVID

Children's Hospital Los Angeles, in the western U.S. state of California, will take a holistic approach to understand how early inflammatory and tissue responses can predict long-term health consequences of COVID-19 in children, according to a release of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday.

People infected with SARS-CoV-2 typically recover within a few days or weeks. However some individuals have long-term effects that persist for multiple weeks, months, or even years, known as long COVID.

While considerable efforts have gone into understanding how COVID-19 affects the body in adults, much less is known about how COVID-19 affects children, and how those effects manifest into long-term health consequences of COVID-19 infection, said the FDA.

The new project will study clinical cohorts of children to try to identify a COVID-19-specific inflammatory and tissue damage disease signature.

The project also seeks to identify potential biomarkers that correlate to a COVID-19-specific inflammatory and tissue damage disease signature during the disease course, said the FDA.

Children's Hospital Los Angeles will integrate molecular and clinical assessments of pediatric patient samples to develop a model that can predict whether a child is more likely to have long-term negative outcomes from COVID-19.