However, SARS-CoV-2 readily infected the investigators' cultured pancreatic cells in the laboratory, and caused a striking change in the beta cells, causing them to produce significantly less insulin and more glucagon. It could represent SARS-CoV-2 infection at a different site and then impacting the islet,” said Dr. "We're not saying necessarily that this demonstrates that there's infection within these tissues, because we're seeing this after they've died. Nonetheless, the researchers are circumspect about the findings. The combination of viral RNA genomes and viral protein antigens strongly suggests the presence of viral antigens in the patients' pancreatic tissue, she said. "We screened a lot of pancreatic autopsy samples and eventually we found five patients who had very robust viral RNA, and who also had very robust staining of SARS-CoV-2 antigen in different endocrine cells," Dr. Chen, Schwartz and their colleagues and collaborators at Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the National Institutes of Health, and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania took a two-pronged approach: looking for SARS-CoV-2 in pancreatic tissue taken at autopsy from patients who'd died of COVID-19, and further probing SARS-CoV-2 infection of stem cell-derived pancreatic cells in culture. To explore whether the virus might be able to cause such damage, Drs. Robert Schwartz, an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and a faculty member in the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences’s Physiology, Biophysics and Systems Biology program at Weill Cornell Medicine. “However it is not clear whether the virus is present in the pancreas,” said co-senior author Dr. Chen said, some physicians have reported unstable glucose and insulin levels in COVID-19 patients, which would be consistent with the virus causing damage to the beta cells. Beta cells, which produce insulin, are crucial regulators of blood glucose levels, and pathologies in these cells can cause diabetes. ![]() ![]() ![]() Shuibing Chen, the Kilts Family Associate Professor of Surgery, an associate professor of chemical biology in surgery and of chemical biology in biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medicine, and co-senior author on the new study, which was published May 19 in Cell Metabolism. "What we found is that as expected, lung can be infected, but very surprisingly we find pancreatic beta cells can also be infected," said Dr. ![]() The intent of that work was to survey the spectrum of tissues that might be infected during COVID-19, a disease with a diverse array of symptoms in different patients. Some of the same researchers had previously generated multiple cell types from human stem cells and tested them to see which ones SARS-CoV-2 could infect. Though the results come from analyses of autopsy samples and cultured cells and don't prove a direct causal relationship, they dovetail with clinical reports of glucose control problems in COVID-19 patients, suggesting a new dimension of disease development for a virus that has already killed millions. SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the global COVID-19 pandemic, can infect human pancreatic cells and alter their physiology, according to research from Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |