Respiratory disease in rhesus macaques inoculated with SARS-CoV-2

By V. Munster, F. Feldmann, Brandi N. Williamson, Neeltje van Doremalen, L. Pérez-Pérez, Jonathan E. Schulz, Kimberly Meade-White, A. Okumura, Julie A. Callison, Beniah Brumbaugh and 7 more. Nature, 2020

636 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by a novel coronavirus (named SARS-CoV-2) and has a case fatality rate of approximately 2%, started in Wuhan (China) in December 20191,2. Following an unprecedented global spread3, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020. Although data on COVID-19 in humans are emerging at a steady pace, some aspects of the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 can be studied in detail only in animal models, in which repeated sampling and tissue collection is possible. Here we show that SARS-CoV-2 causes a respiratory disease in rhesus macaques that lasts between 8 and 16 days. Pulmonary infiltrates, which are a hallmark of COVID-19 in humans, were visible in lung radiographs. We detected high viral loads in swabs from the nose and throat of all of the macaques, as well as in bronchoalveolar lavages; in one macaque, we observed prolonged rectal shedding. Together, the rhesus macaque recapitulates the moderate disease that has been observed in the majority of human cases of COVID-19. The establishment of the rhesus macaque as a model of COVID-19 will increase our understanding of the pathogenesis of this disease, and aid in the development and testing of medical countermeasures. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques causes a respiratory disease that recapitulates aspects of COVID-19 in humans, establishing this species as an animal model for investigating the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a789e21e86a23c559a2d4abd6857da3684b659c7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Infectious Diseases

1. V. Munster
2. E. de Wit
3. D. Falzarano
4. Ralph S. Baric
5. S. Perlman
6. J. Chan
7. Marion Koopmans
8. Fang Li

Citations in the corpus

• Animal models for COVID-19 (2020, background): “Studies from several laboratories have shown high levels of viral replication for 7–14 days (including both viral RNA and infectious virus) in both the upper and lower respiratory tract, pathological features of viral pneumonia and the variable induction of mild clinical disease 52–55 .”
• Development of an Inactivated Vaccine Candidate, BBIBP-CorV, with Potent Protection against SARS-CoV-2 (2020, neutral): “Because a recent study showed that SARS-CoV-2 infection does not affect host blood chemistry (Munster et al., 2020), this result suggests that inoculation with BBIBP-CorV does not result in side effects on serum biochemical parameters.”
• Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans (2020, background): “(17), tree shrew (18), cynomolgus macaques (19), African”
• SARS-CoV-2 Receptor ACE2 Is an Interferon-Stimulated Gene in Human Airway Epithelial Cells and Is Detected in Specific Cell Subsets across Tissues (2020, neutral): “…established NHP models available of SARS-CoV infection in M. fascicularis and C. aethiops, and early reports suggest symptomatic infection in M. mulatta and M. fascicularis models for SARS-CoV-2 (Bao et al., 2020; McCray et al., 2007; Munster et al., 2020; Rockx et al., 2020; Smits et al., 2011).”
• 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 .”
• Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission and Pathogenesis (2020, neutral): “SARS-CoV-2 has also been detected in nasal swabs at 10 dpi in NHPs, consistent with the prolonged URT shedding of virus in patients with COVID-19 at ~9 dpi [51,124,125,127].”