Research carried out at the CITF-funded Biobanque québécoise de la COVID-19 (BQC19), published in PLOS Genetics by Drs. Guillaume Butler-Laporte, Brent Richards, and Vincent Mooser (McGill University), showed that those with a rare deleterious variant (disease causing variant) in the SARS-CoV-2 sensor toll-like receptor TLR7 gene (on chromosome X in the host) were associated with a 5.3-fold increase in severe disease.