Cell response to new coronavirus unveils possible paths to treatments

NIH-supported scientists compare novel coronavirus to SARS coronavirus

2013-05-01

(Press-News.org) WHAT:

NIH-supported scientists used lab-grown human lung cells to study the cells' response to infection by a novel human coronavirus (called nCoV) and compiled information about which genes are significantly disrupted in early and late stages of infection. The information about host response to nCoV allowed the researchers to predict drugs that might be used to inhibit either the virus itself or the deleterious responses that host cells make in reaction to infection. Since nCoV was recognized in 2012, 17 confirmed cases and 11 deaths have been reported—a high fatality rate that is spurring urgent research efforts to better understand the virus and its effects.

The investigators, led by Michael G. Katze, Ph.D., of the University of Washington, compared cellular gene expression responses to two viruses: the novel coronavirus and a coronavirus that caused a global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. Although the viruses are in the same family, their effects on human cells are vastly different. In general, nCoV disrupted a greater number of human genes more profoundly and at more time points after infection than the SARS coronavirus. The team identified one set of 207 human genes whose expression differed from normal soon after infection with nCoV and remained disrupted throughout the course of infection. Notably, nCoV down-regulated the activity of a group of genes involved in signaling the presence of an invading virus to the immune system. Such down-regulation may cause a delay in the infection-fighting response.

The researchers used computational approaches to determine that certain classes of drugs, including specific kinase inhibitors and one type of glucocorticoid, act on some of the 207 human genes whose expression was found to be disrupted by nCoV. The team hypothesized that treatment with such drugs might block nCoV replication and disease progression in the host. In their current study, they tested this hypothesis using a kinase inhibitor on nCoV-infected cells grown in test tubes. They found that the drug did inhibit the ability of the virus to replicate. Additional studies are needed to see if kinase inhibitors could be useful alone or in combination with other drugs to treat nCoV infection in people.

ARTICLE:

L Josset et al. Cell host response to infection with novel human coronavirus EMC predicts potential antivirals and important differences with SARS coronavirus. mBio DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00165-13 (2013) (http://mbio.asm.org/content/4/3/e00165-13).

WHO:

Valentina Di Francesco, program officer, Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is available to discuss this research.

INFORMATION:

CONTACT:

To schedule interviews, please contact, Anne A. Oplinger, (301) 402-1663, aoplinger@niaid.nih.gov.

This work was funded by NIH, NIAID under grant number AI081680.

NIAID conducts and supports research—at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide—to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID Web site at http://www.niaid.nih.gov.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov/.

NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

In the Northeast, forests with entirely native flora are not the norm

2013-05-01

Two-thirds of all forest inventory plots in the Northeast and Midwestern United States contain at least one non-native plant species, a new U.S. Forest Service study found. The study across two dozen states from North Dakota to Maine can help land managers pinpoint areas on the landscape where invasive plants might take root. "We found two-thirds of more than 1,300 plots from our annual forest inventory had at least one introduced species, but this also means that one-third of the plots had no introduced species," said Beth Schulz, a research ecologist at the Pacific ...

Chemo, radiation followed by surgery improves survival in lung cancer patients

2013-05-01

In one of the largest observational studies of its kind, researchers report that a combination of chemotherapy and radiation followed by surgery in patients with stage 3 non-small cell lung cancer improves survival. Patients who had chemoradiation therapy followed by surgery had twice the five-year survival rate of those who had only chemoradiation, says Dr. Matthew Koshy, a radiation oncologist at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and lead author of the study. The study, published online in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, looked at various ...

Advancing emergency care for kids: Emergency physicians do it again

2013-05-01

WASHINGTON —Most children with isolated skull fractures may not need to stay in the hospital, which finding has the potential to save the health care system millions of dollars a year ("Isolated Skull Fractures: Trends in Management in U.S. Pediatric Emergency Departments"). In addition, a new device more accurately estimates children's weights, leading to more precise drug dosing in the ER ("Evaluation of the Mercy TAPE: Performance Against the Standard for Pediatric Weight Estimation"). Two studies published online this month in Annals of Emergency Medicine showcase ...

Rice study: Professional culture contributes to gender wage inequality in engineering

2013-05-01

HOUSTON – (April 30, 2013) – Women engineers are underpaid for their contributions to technical activities, due to cultural ideologies in the engineering profession, according to Rice University research. "Cultural ideologies within professions may seem benign and have little salience outside of a profession's boundaries, but may play an important role in wage inequality," said Rice Assistant Professor of Sociology Erin Cech. To study the engineering profession, Cech used National Science Foundation survey data to demonstrate that patterns of sex segregation and unequal ...

Penn research helps to show how turbulence can occur without inertia

2013-05-01

Anyone who has flown in an airplane knows about turbulence, or when the flow of a fluid — in this case, the flow of air over the wings — becomes chaotic and unstable. For more than a century, the field of fluid mechanics has posited that turbulence scales with inertia, and so massive things, like planes, have an easier time causing it. Now, research led by engineers at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that this transition to turbulence can occur without inertia at all. The study was conducted by associate professor Paulo E. Arratia and graduate student Lichao ...

Targeted C. difficile screening at hospital admission could potentially ID most colonized patients

2013-05-01

Washington, DC, April 30, 2013 – Testing patients with just three risk factors upon hospital admission has potential to identify nearly three out of four asymptomatic carriers of C. difficile, according to a new study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). Researchers from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, analyzed stool samples from 320 patients showing no symptoms of C. difficile at hospital admission using a real-time polymerase ...

Nephrologist follow-up improves mortality of severe acute kidney injury patients

2013-05-01

TORONTO, April 30, 2013—Patients with acute kidney injury who see a nephrologist within 90 days of being discharged from a hospital have a 24 per cent lower risk of dying than those who do not see a kidney specialist, a new study has found. The benefit of seeing a nephrologist was most pronounced in individuals who had not previously seen a nephrologist, and likely had new onset kidney disease, according to the study by Dr. Ziv Harel of St. Michael's Hospital. The study appears in the May issue of the journal Kidney International. Acute kidney injury (acute renal failure ...

Estrogen fuels autoimmune liver damage

2013-05-01

A life-threatening condition that often requires transplantation and accounts for half of all acute liver failures, autoimmune hepatitis is often precipitated by certain anesthetics and antibiotics. Researchers say these drugs contain tiny molecules called haptens that ever so slightly change normal liver proteins, causing the body to mistake its own liver cells for foreign invaders and to attack them. The phenomenon disproportionately occurs in women, even when they take the same drugs at the same doses as men. Results of the new study, described in the April issue of ...

How to manage motorway tolls through the Game Theory

2013-05-01

This press release is available in Spanish. The team led by José Manuel Zarzuelo,Professor of Applied Economics, has applied the co-operative Game Theory to calculating motorway toll charges. The results of the study have been published in the specialised journal European Journal of Operational Research. In this study, the authors propose that sophisticated mathematical methods could be used in traffic management. "Yes, it can be done," explains Jose Manuel Zarzuelo. "In the United States it's been done on public highways; yet in the case of Spain most of the motorways ...

How some cancers 'poison the soil' to block metastasis

2013-05-01

NEW YORK (April 30, 2013) -- Cancer spread or metastasis can strike unprecedented fear in the minds of cancer patients. The "seed and the soil" hypothesis proposed by Stephen Paget in 1889 is now widely accepted to explain how cancer cells (seeds) are able to generate fertile soil (the microenvironment) in distant organs that promotes cancer's spread. However, this concept does not explain why some tumors do not spread or metastasize. Scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College have now solved this mystery by showing that metastatic incompetent cancers actually poison ...

Cell response to new coronavirus unveils possible paths to treatments

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: