Episode 47: Dr David Putrino - The Putrino Lab
David Putrino is a neuroscientist and physical therapist, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation and lead of the Putrino Lab at the Mt. Sinai Health System in New York City. He has been at the forefront of Long Covid research and strategy development since the early days of the pandemic.
In his recent study of 215 people, Putrino and Mount Sinai have collaborated with Akiko Iwasaki and Yale University to see if they could find any ‘Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune profiling’. The study looked at a huge range of biomarkers– from T-cells to hormone levels – to establish what unifies those with Long Covid and what differentiates the various subsets. Putrino describes this as a hypothesis generating paper and hopes that it is a jumping off point from which multiple other labs will start to further research.
Whilst the media jumped on the finding of low morning cortisol levels in Long Covid patients, Putrino’s assessment of the study was that there is no singular biomarker, and that Long Covid is a “big blanket diagnosis”. There are many different pathways and biological processes causing the different symptoms that people are experiencing, but his big takeaway was that putting the various blood biomarkers into a machine learning classifier it was possible to differentiate Long Covid from non-Long Covid patients with 96% accuracy.
His passion for trying to help the millions with Long Covid is very apparent through his work, both with Mount Sinai and his many collaborations, alongside his strong social media voice. The world of medicine seems to fall predominantly into two schools when it comes to Long Covid – one that is deeply worried about the long term impact of SARS-CoV-2 on our bodies; the other that still dismiss the Post-Covid sequelae and tries to hang the symptoms on other conditions or previous co-morbidities. Putrino and his lab are building curriculum materials for medical schools and continuing education courses for currently practising physician in an effort to bring the profession up to speed on the syndrome.
Putrino is clear that there is not one strategy that fits all when it comes to treating Long Covid and that if someone is trying to sell you their ‘cure all’ then they are probably something akin to a snake oil salesman. “There are still people out there trying to pitch their one supplement or their one medicinal or their one device that is curing all Long Covid. There’s at least 10 or 15 mechanisms that we're chasing right now. And each one needs a precision approach.”