Manel Esteller, professor of Genetics. Aurora Pujol, IDIBELL researcher. COVID-19, caused by the infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has changed people’s behavioural patterns since the moment it became a global pandemic. To date, more than 136 million people have suffered from this disease, and more than 2.9 of these have lost their lives. The symptoms of the infection are varied, ranging from people with no clinical symptomatology to those who need hospital admission in the intensive care unit with the help from emergency assisted ventilation. At the moment, the factors responsible for this wide range of clinical pictures are still unknown. Now, an article in EBioMedicine –The Lancet’s sister journal for laboratory findings– shows that the epigenetic endowment of every person has an impact on the severity of COVID-19. The study was carried out by the teams led by Manel Esteller, professor at the Department of Physiological Sciences of the UB, director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC) and ICREA research professor, and Aurora Pujol, also ICREA professor and head of the IDIBELL Neurometabolic Diseases Group.