Deep learning identifies antigenic determinants of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection within T-cell repertoires

SARS-CoV-2 infection is characterized by a highly variable clinical course with patients experiencing asymptomatic infection all the way to requiring critical care support. This variation in clinical course has led physicians and scientists to study factors that may predispose certain individuals to more severe clinical presentations in hopes of either identifying these individuals early in their illness or improving their medical management. We sought to understand immunogenomic differences that may result in varied clinical outcomes through analysis of T-cell receptor sequencing (TCR-Seq) data in the open access ImmuneCODE database. We identified two cohorts within the database that had clinical outcomes data reflecting severity of illness and utilized DeepTCR, a multiple-instance deep learning repertoire classifier, to predict patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 infection from their repertoire sequencing. We demonstrate that patients with severe infection have repertoires with higher T-cell responses associated with SARS-CoV-2 epitopes and identify the epitopes that result in these responses. Our results provide evidence that the highly variable clinical course seen in SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated to certain antigen-specific responses.

Automated summary

In patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 infection, higher T-cell responses associated with SARS-CoV-2 epitopes were identified, indicating the variability in clinical course may be related to certain antigen-specific responses.