Infection and Rapid Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Ferrets

By Young-Il Kim, Seonggyu Kim, Se-Mi Kim, Eun-Ha Kim, Su-Jin Park, Kwang-Min Yu, Jae-Hyung Chang, Eun Ji Kim, Seunghun Lee, M. A. Casel and 15 more. Cell Host and Microbe, 2020

868 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in China and rapidly spread worldwide. To prevent SARS-CoV-2 dissemination, understanding the in vivo characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 is a high priority. We report a ferret model of SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission that recapitulates aspects of human disease. SARS-CoV-2-infected ferrets exhibit elevated body temperatures and virus replication. Although fatalities were not observed, SARS-CoV-2-infected ferrets shed virus in nasal washes, saliva, urine, and feces up to 8 days post-infection. At 2 days post-contact, SARS-CoV-2 was detected in all naive direct contact ferrets. Furthermore, a few naive indirect contact ferrets were positive for viral RNA, suggesting airborne transmission. Viral antigens were detected in nasal turbinate, trachea, lungs, and intestine with acute bronchiolitis present in infected lungs. Thus, ferrets represent an infection and transmission animal model of COVID-19 that may facilitate development of SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics and vaccines.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77e4e132178a5a4d5e0bc5504f42bcf8670060e8

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Citations in the corpus

• A mouse-adapted model of SARS-CoV-2 to test COVID-19 countermeasures (2020, neutral): “Several animal models for SARS-CoV-2 have been reported, with varying degrees of viral replication and clinical disease, including ACE2 transgenic mice 9–11 and virally transduced ACE2 mice 8,12,13 , which express human ACE2, ferrets 14 , hamsters 15,16 and non-human primates 17–19 .”
• Imbalanced Host Response to SARS-CoV-2 Drives Development of COVID-19 (2020, neutral): “The presence of virus in the nasal passage would further suggest that these ferrets had the potential to transmit the virus, in agreement with the findings of others (Kim et al., 2020; Varble et al., 2014).”
• Ferret as a Model System for Studying the Anatomy and Function of the Prefrontal Cortex: A Systematic Review (2024, background): “Ferrets have also played an integral role in understanding various aspects of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)(Kim et al., 2020).”