Does Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor predict the prognosis of COVID-19 disease?

Abstract

Introduction: The aim of this study is to investigate whether macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) predicts the prognosis of COVID-19 disease.
 Methodology: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted on 87 confirmed COVID-19 patients. The patients were separated into two groups according to the admission in the ICU or in the ward. MIF was determined batchwise in plasma obtained as soon as the patients were admitted. Both groups were compared with respect to demographic characteristics, biochemical parameters and prediction of requirement to ICU admission.
 Results: Forty seven patients in ICU, and 40 patients in ward were included. With respect to MIF levels and biochemical biomarkers, there was a statistically significant difference between the ICU and ward patients (p< 0.024). In terms of ICU requirement, the cut-off value of MIF was detected as 4.705 (AUC:0.633, 95%CI:0.561-0.79, p= 0.037), D-dimer was 789 (AUC:0.779, 95%CI: 0.681-0.877, p= 0.000), troponin was 8.15 (AUC: 0.820, 95%CI:0.729-0.911, p= 0.000), ferritin was 375 (AUC: 0.774, 95%CI:0.671-0.876, p= 0.000), and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) was 359.5 (AUC:0.843, 95%CI: 0.753-0.933, p= 0.000). According to the logistic regression analysis; when MIF level > 4.705, the patient’s requirement to ICU risk was increased to 8.33 (95%CI: 1.73-44.26, p= 0.009) fold. Similarly, elevation of troponin, ferritin and, LDH was shown to predict disease prognosis (p< 0.05).
 Conclusions: Our study showed that MIF may play a role in inflammatory responses to COVID-19 through induction of pulmonary inflammatory cytokines, suggesting that pharmacotherapeutic approaches targeting MIF may hold promise for the treatment of COVID-19 pneumonia.

Identifying novel host-based diagnostic biomarker panels for COVID-19: a whole-blood/nasopharyngeal transcriptome meta-analysis

“…Furthermore, the significant overexpression of CXCL11 transcripts has been demonstrated in patients with mild to severe disease, which may be related to different T cell responses in COVID-19 patients (Yang et al 2020 ). Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF), another biomarker candidate, has an important role in the inflammatory response to SARS-COV-2 infection by inducing the pulmonary inflammatory cytokines (Dheir et al 2021 ). In addition, it has been observed that the level of MIF is higher in severe patients with COVID-19 (Aksakal et al 2021 ).…”

Exploring the potential mechanism of emetine against coronavirus disease 2019 combined with lung adenocarcinoma: bioinformatics and molecular simulation analyses

“…Moreover, exposure to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein combined with hypoxia enhanced MIF production [ 69 ]. Also, MIF can induce lung inflammatory cytokines in the COVID-19-induced inflammatory reaction [ 70 ]. The results suggested that the intersecting genes were likely to be effective therapeutic targets of emetine against LUAD/COVID-19 (Fig.…”

Analyzing network diversity of cell–cell interactions in COVID-19 using single-cell transcriptomics

“…We observed that the MIF pathway is also the most differential pathway across conditions ( Figure 2C ). Furthermore, as recent studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between the MIF serum level and COVID-19 severity, suggesting that the MIF serum level may be a useful predictor of COVID-19 disease severity ( Aksakal et al, 2021 ; Bleilevens et al, 2021 ; Dheir et al, 2021 ), we focused our analysis on CCI diversities in the MIF pathway for the remainder of this study.…”