AUTHOR=Reis Ruy Freitas , Pigozzo Alexandre Bittencourt , Bonin Carla Rezende Barbosa , Quintela Barbara de Melo , Pompei Lara Turetta , Vieira Ana Carolina , Silva Larissa de Lima e , Xavier Maicom Peters , Weber dos Santos Rodrigo , Lobosco Marcelo TITLE=A Validated Mathematical Model of the Cytokine Release Syndrome in Severe COVID-19 JOURNAL=Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences VOLUME=8 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/molecular-biosciences/articles/10.3389/fmolb.2021.639423 DOI=10.3389/fmolb.2021.639423 ISSN=2296-889X ABSTRACT=

By June 2021, a new contagious disease, the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has infected more than 172 million people worldwide, causing more than 3.7 million deaths. Many aspects related to the interactions of the disease’s causative agent, SAR2-CoV-2, and the immune response are not well understood: the multiscale interactions among the various components of the human immune system and the pathogen are very complex. Mathematical and computational tools can help researchers to answer these open questions about the disease. In this work, we present a system of fifteen ordinary differential equations that models the immune response to SARS-CoV-2. The model is used to investigate the hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 infects immune cells and, for this reason, induces high-level productions of inflammatory cytokines. Simulation results support this hypothesis and further explain why survivors have lower levels of cytokines levels than non-survivors.