ArticleCommunications medicine2026
Prospective multicentre study of upper respiratory mucosal transcriptomics reveals two major endotypes of critically ill COVID-19 patients.
Article in Communications medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
27 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSevere COVID-19 is associated with dysregulated immune responses. Immune responses heterogeneity was previously reported during the first waves of the pandemic. We aimed to characterise mucosal transcriptomic profiles in critically-ill patients during the Omicron era.
methodsThis prospective multicentre study included 94 critically-ill COVID-19 patients between May 2022 and August 2023. Upper respiratory tract mucosal transcriptomes were obtained from nasopharyngeal swabs and clustered based on KEGG cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction pathways using an unsupervised algorithm. Differential transcript expression, cell population abundance and gene set enrichment analyses were performed.
resultsHere we show that in 56 critically ill COVID-19 patients, transcriptomic clustering reveals two distinct COVID-19 Immune Transcriptomic Respiratory Profiles (CITRP), including CITRP-1 and CITRP-2, characterised by differential expression of cytokine and immune response pathways. Patients in the CITRP-2 group display a more pronounced immune and inflammatory response, involving specific innate immune pathways, neutrophil degranulation and T-helper 2 cytokines (e.g., IL-1, IL-4 and IL-13), and a significantly higher proportion of neutrophils than patients in the CITRP-1 group. No significant differences are observed between the two transcriptomic clusters in clinical, biological and virological characteristics at ICU admission or in patient outcomes.
conclusionsThis study highlights the heterogeneity of the immune response in critically-ill COVID-19 patients in the Omicron era, identifies two endotypes from the analysis of upper airway mucosal transcriptomics. Our findings suggest the existence of two distinct pathogenic mechanisms and the detrimental role of neutrophil and Th2 helper cell-mediated inflammation in a subset of patients with severe disease. They support the need for personalised treatment strategies targeting neutrophil-mediated lung damage and/or specific cytokine production in a subset of critically-ill COVID-19 patients.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.