The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may launch a line of inquiry that informs new strategies for quelling the most serious symptoms of COVID-19. Led by a UCLA team, the scientific collaboration comprises nearly three dozen engineers, microbiologists, immunologists, chemists, physicists, medical researchers and analytical experts. Authors are based at universities, medical centers and national laboratories and institutes in the United States, China, Germany, India and Italy.

The team’s findings build on an earlier UCLA discovery identifying “zombie” coronavirus fragments that can imitate the activity of molecules from the body’s own immune system to drive inflammation. Now, not only have the researchers shown that human immune enzymes can break down the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into such fragments, they found that some fragments can work together to attack important types of immune cells by targeting their cell shapes.