Autoantigen profiling reveals a shared post-COVID signature in fully recovered and long COVID patients

We studied the presence of autoantibodies among LIINC participants. Antibodies are proteins the body makes to fight infections, but they can also hurt the body if they are dysfunctional and attack us and not pathogens. These dysfunctional antibodies are called autoantibodies, and some think they could contribute to Long COVID. In this paper, we studied the presence of autoantibodies among LIINC participants. While we found there are some differences in autoantibodies in people who’ve had a COVID-19 infection and those who have not, we found no shared group of autoantibodies consistently present among those with Long COVID. This might mean that autoimmunity, if present, is unique to the individual and that there is not one clear autoimmune pathway driving Long COVID.