Autoantibodies can be early harbingers of full-blown autoimmune disease.

"If you get sick enough from COVID-19 to end up in the hospital, you may not be out of the woods even after you recover," said PJ Utz, MD, professor of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford Medicine.

Utz shares senior authorship of the study, which will be published Sept. 14 in Nature Communications, with Chrysanthi Skevaki, MD, Ph.D., instructor of virology and laboratory medicine at Philipps University Marburg in Germany, and Eline Luning Prak, MD, Ph.D., professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The study's lead authors are Sarah Chang, a former technician in Utz's lab; recent Stanford undergraduate Allen Feng, now a technician in the Utz lab; and senior research investigator Wenshao Meng, Ph.D., and postdoctoral scholar Sokratis Apostolidis, MD, both at the University of Pennsylvania.

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