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Review
. 2021 Mar 25:12:652470.
doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2021.652470. eCollection 2021.

Neutrophils in COVID-19

Nico Reusch  1   2 , Elena De Domenico  1   3 , Lorenzo Bonaguro  1   2 , Jonas Schulte-Schrepping  1   2 , Kevin Baßler  1   2 , Joachim L Schultze  1   2   3 , Anna C Aschenbrenner  1   2   3   4
Affiliations
Review

Neutrophils in COVID-19

Nico Reusch et al. Front Immunol. .

Abstract

Strong evidence has been accumulated since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that neutrophils play an important role in the pathophysiology, particularly in those with severe disease courses. While originally considered to be a rather homogeneous cell type, recent attention to neutrophils has uncovered their fascinating transcriptional and functional diversity as well as their developmental trajectories. These new findings are important to better understand the many facets of neutrophil involvement not only in COVID-19 but also many other acute or chronic inflammatory diseases, both communicable and non-communicable. Here, we highlight the observed immune deviation of neutrophils in COVID-19 and summarize several promising therapeutic attempts to precisely target neutrophils and their reactivity in patients with COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; clinical trials; granulocytes; neutrophils; scRNA-seq; viral infection.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Neutrophil subsets in health and severe COVID-19. Overview of the different subsets of neutrophils found in bone marrow (left), blood (center) and lung (bronchoalveolar space, right) in health (top) and severe COVID-19 (bottom). HSC, hematopoietic stem cells; CLP, common lymphoid progenitors; GMP, granulocyte-monocyte progenitor cell; Neu, neutrophil; ISG, interferon-stimulated genes; NET, neutrophil associated extracellular trap; ROS, reactive oxygen species; created with BioRender.com.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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