(NPR) – As Bodansky and his colleagues report in the journal Nature, many children who developed MIS-C had an out-of-control immune response to COVID as a result of mistaken identity. Basically, these children’s immune systems locked onto a part of the coronavirus that closely resembles a protein found in immune cells that are located throughout the body.

That caused the immune system to mistakenly target itself instead of the virus, says Joe DeRisi, president of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco, and a senior author of the study. “And that causes inflammation, we believe, to spin out of control,” he says. (Read More)