Comparative pathogenesis of COVID-19, MERS, and SARS in a nonhuman primate model
By B. Rockx, T. Kuiken, S. Herfst, T. Bestebroer, M. Lamers, B. O. Oude Munnink, D. de Meulder, G. van Amerongen, J. V. D. van den Brand, Nisreen M. A. Okba and 14 more. Science, 2020
846 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Coronavirus in nonhuman primates We urgently need vaccines and drug treatments for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Even under these extreme circumstances, we must have animal models for rigorous testing of new strategies. Rockx et al. have undertaken a comparative study of three human coronaviruses in cynomolgus macaques: severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus (SARS-CoV) (2002), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)–CoV (2012), and SARS-CoV-2 (2019), which causes COVID-19 (see the Perspective by Lakdawala and Menachery). The most recent coronavirus has a distinct tropism for the nasal mucosa but is also found in the intestinal tract. Although none of the older macaques showed the severe symptoms that humans do, the lung pathology observed was similar. Like humans, the animals shed virus for prolonged periods from their upper respiratory tracts, and like influenza but unlike the 2002 SARS-CoV, this shedding peaked early in infection. It is this cryptic virus shedding that makes case detection difficult and can jeopardize the effectiveness of isolation. Science, this issue p. 1012; see also p. 942 SARS-CoV-2 infection in macaques results in COVID-19–like disease with prolonged virus shedding from the nose and throat in the absence of symptoms. The current pandemic coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was recently identified in patients with an acute respiratory syndrome, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). To compare its pathogenesis with that of previously emerging coronaviruses, we inoculated cynomolgus macaques with SARS-CoV-2 or Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)–CoV and compared the pathology and virology with historical reports of SARS-CoV infections. In SARS-CoV-2–infected macaques, virus was excreted from nose and throat in the absence of clinical signs and detected in type I and II pneumocytes in foci of diffuse alveolar damage and in ciliated epithelial cells of nasal, bronchial, and bronchiolar mucosae. In SARS-CoV infection, lung lesions were typically more severe, whereas they were milder in MERS-CoV infection, where virus was detected mainly in type II pneumocytes. These data show that SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19–like disease in macaques and provides a new model to test preventive and therapeutic strategies.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94b4e70c5d2fa6fd757ce3b7c0bc747fe039fc8a
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In Infectious Diseases
Citations in the corpus
- Antigen-Specific Adaptive Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in Acute COVID-19 and Associations with Age and Disease Severity (2020, neutral): “, 2020), similar to what was observed for SARS (Rockx et al., 2020).”
- 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 .”
- Syrian hamsters as a small animal model for SARS-CoV-2 infection and countermeasure development (2020, background): “Importantly, the use of this animal model would facilitate the rapid evaluation of vaccine or antiviral therapy candidates at a relatively low cost compared to other animal models such as ferrets and nonhuman primates, which have also been shown to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection (28, 29).”
- SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater: State of the knowledge and research needs (2020, neutral): “Shedding varied depending on the age of the animal, with higher levels detected in nasal swabs of aged animals compared to younger animals (Rockx et al., 2020).”
- Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission and Pathogenesis (2020, neutral): “By contrast, cynomolgus macaques did not display any observational signs of disease in another study [125].”
- SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) by the numbers (2020, background): ““ and (Walls et al. 2020) - “SARS-CoV-2 uses ACE2 to enter target cells” and (Rockx et al. 2020) - “In SARS-CoV-2-infected macaques, virus was excreted from nose and throat in absence of clinical signs, and detected in type I and II pneumocytes in foci of diffuse alveolar damage and mucous …”