The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is taking a new look at a severe complication of COVID-19 that affects a small percentage of children — Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) — through the possibility of a $20 million award for research proposals.
“We urgently need methods to distinguish children at high risk for MIS-C from those unlikely to experience major ill effects from the virus, so that we can develop early interventions to improve their outcomes,” Dr. Diana Bianchi, director of NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said.
Interested parties will need to develop approaches that identify those children at high risk, using studies of genetic, immune, viral, environmental, or other factors that influence the severity of cases and risk of MIS-C development. The project is being called the Predicting Viral-Associated Inflammatory Disease Severity in Children with Laboratory Diagnostics and Artificial Intelligence (PreVAIL kids), a part of NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative. Any monetary award would be dispersed over four years.
While COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the elderly and immunocompromised, MIS-C is a serious condition that has developed in some children exposed to the virus. Sometimes fatal, it’s a condition that causes inflammation of organs and tissues such as the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, and eyes. Studies funded by PreVAIL kids will analyze genes and other biomarkers in pediatric cases of COVID-19 to see exactly how it affects its hosts, and how such conditions might come about.
The initiative aims to understand the factors that cause this condition in children, as well as its symptoms.