Dr. Maurice O’Gorman to Speak on AAAS Webinar About Monitoring the Immune System as a Way to Fight COVID-19

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Maurice O’Gorman, PhD, MSc, will participate in an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) webinar about monitoring the immune system as a way to fight COVID-19 on Thursday, April 30, at noon ET.

He will be part of an expert panel of speakers that will also include Andrea Cossarizza, MD, PhD, Vice Dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, and President of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry, and Lishomwa Ndhlovu, MBBS, PhD, a Professor of immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and Principal Investigator of the HIV and Emerging Pathogens Immunopathogenesis Laboratory.

Dr. O’Gorman, Chief of Laboratory Medicine at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and Professor of Pathology and Pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, is an expert in immune monitoring and flow cytometry assays for the assessment of immune dysfunction. During this webinar, Dr. O’Gorman will discuss early results from labs around the world that have begun measuring CD4 and CD8 T-cell levels in peripheral blood as potential biomarkers for the prognosis of patients with COVID-19.

Decreased CD4 and CD8 cells means more severe disease.

Hospitals are observing that patients with severe cases of COVID-19 have significantly lower absolute numbers of CD4 and CD8 T-lymphocytes in their peripheral blood, compared to patients with mild or moderate disease. Low numbers of CD4 cells could potentially impact a patient’s ability to form antibodies against the virus, and low CD8 cells could diminish the patient’s ability to eliminate coronavirus from the body.

Dr. O’Gorman will discuss the potential role for routine measurement of CD4 and CD8 T-cells—a process called immunophenotyping—in hospitalized COVID-19 patients participating in clinical trials. Immunophenotyping may provide a tool for prognostics stratification of disease, and potentially as a way to monitor response to treatment.

Register for this Science/AAAS webinar here: https://www.sciencemag.org/custom-publishing/webinars/monitoring-immune-system-fight-covid-19-cd4-status-lymphopenia-and