Advancing the Rapid Diagnosis of COVID-19 Related Inflammatory Syndrome in Children

This grant award will allow Dr. Salazar and his team of researcher colleagues to continue their efforts to develop a tool that can easily diagnose MIS-C, which presents similar symptoms to COVID-19 and to Kawasaki disease, another rare condition affecting children. Faster identification of those most at risk will allow for earlier interventions to prevent severe health effects.

“We’re trying to use bedside point-of-care technology to help differentiate COVID vs. Kawasaki vs. MIS-C,” Salazar said, “which is a big problem right now because we don’t have a good way of doing that readily at this point.”

The study is a collaborative effort involving researchers from the University of Connecticut Storrs, University of Connecticut Health Center, the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, New York Department of Health, New York University, and the Food and Drug Administration. Over the past two years, 630 children with MIS-C, COVID-19, Kawasaki disease, respiratory viral disease, and no disease (healthy controls) have been enrolled from sites in Connecticut and Cali, Colombia, and their blood and saliva have been studied to identify proteins and bacteria that are unique to MIS-C. The point-of-care test is using cutting-edge chip technology developed by Ciencia, Inc. (East Harford, CT) that can test for multiple proteins simultaneously. Preliminary results are promising, with the identification of 19 proteins that distinguish between MIS-C and other diagnoses, and eight proteins that distinguish between MIS-C and Kawasaki disease.