Future Directions

 

Physiological Markers, Clinical Outcome, Genetic Profiles

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For a limited number of samples (< 10%) we have data regarding patient status, which can include labels such as 'hospitalized', 'deceased' , 'live' and 'released'. The difficulty of reaching any conclusions with regards to these labels is the unknown of the time delay between the collection time of the RNA sample (which is included) together with notification of the patient status and the time the test was administered and the patient was last monitored. 

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Ideally to predict clinical outcome we would require much more information regarding the symptomatolgy of the patient, physiological markers (blood oxygenation, platelet counts, inflammatory markers - cytokines etc) and interventions that had taken place together with the 'flavour' of the virus derived from bioinformatic analysis. An additional data source that could be very valuable would be the genetic profile of the patients, particularly the presence of certain alleles of the HLA (human leukocyte antigen) gene complex which has a key role in immune regulatory responses.