SARS-CoV-2 invades host cells via a novel route: CD147-spike protein

By Ke Wang, Wei Chen, Yu-sen Zhou, J. Lian, Zheng Zhang, Peng Du, L. Gong, Yang Zhang, H. Cui, J. Geng and 20 more. bioRxiv, 2020

594 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Currently, COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been widely spread around the world; nevertheless, so far there exist no specific antiviral drugs for treatment of the disease, which poses great challenge to control and contain the virus. Here, we reported a research finding that SARS-CoV-2 invaded host cells via a novel route of CD147-spike protein (SP). SP bound to CD147, a receptor on the host cells, thereby mediating the viral invasion. Our further research confirmed this finding. First, in vitro antiviral tests indicated Meplazumab, an anti-CD147 humanized antibody, significantly inhibited the viruses from invading host cells, with an EC50 of 24.86 μg/mL and IC50 of 15.16 μg/mL. Second, we validated the interaction between CD147 and SP, with an affinity constant of 1.85×10−7M. Co-Immunoprecipitation and ELISA also confirmed the binding of the two proteins. Finally, the localization of CD147 and SP was observed in SARS-CoV-2 infected Vero E6 cells by immuno-electron microscope. Therefore, the discovery of the new route CD147-SP for SARS-CoV-2 invading host cells provides a critical target for development of specific antiviral drugs.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e52a93745b0f67586a7327bd12d55f1d1b7ef7e

Citations in the corpus

• Renal histopathological analysis of 26 postmortem findings of patients with COVID-19 in China (2020, unknown): “Recently, SARS-CoV-2 was shown to also invade target cells by CD147, a ubiquitously expressed transmembrane glycoprotein with interaction with diverse partners such as cyclophilins, caveolin-1, and integrins.(12) CD147 is thought to play a role in several kidney diseases through immuneinflammatory r”
• The protein expression profile of ACE2 in human tissues (2020, unknown): “The same applies to testis, kidney, and small intestine datasets, obtained from the following accession numbers: testis GSE112013 (Guo et al , 2018), kidney GSE131685 (Liao et al , 2020), and small intestine GSE125970 (Wang et al , 2020b).”
• Should we stimulate or suppress immune responses in COVID-19? Cytokine and anti-cytokine interventions (2020, unknown): “Of note, another receptor, CD147, has been implicated in mediating host cell invasion by SARS-CoV-2 [13].”
• Host-Viral Infection Maps Reveal Signatures of Severe COVID-19 Patients (2020, unknown): “Interestingly, CD147 (also known as BSG), a potential new SARS-CoV-2 receptor (Wang et al., 2020b), is expressed by all cell types, including immune cells, suggesting alternative routes for the virus to infect these cells.”