Animal Model for COVID-19
Testing whether potential therapeutics are safe and effective typically requires animal testing. One of the biggest challenges with researching COVID-19 and the entire coronavirus family of viruses has been creating accurate animal tests for the vaccines and therapeutics, because, typically, other animals do not have the human ACE2 gene which acts as the receptor for the spike protein that coronaviruses use to attach to cells. Coronaviruses typically do not bind as well to animal ACE2 receptors. Consequently, most animals do not manifest symptoms or are largely unaffected.
When SARS-CoV, the virus responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), first appeared in 2003, researchers genetically modified mice that could contract it by breeding them to express the humanized ACE2 (hACE2) protein. USAMRIID repurposed these modified mice, called K18-hACE2 mice, for the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.
Joseph Golden, PhD, and his colleagues at the institute, took live strains of COVID-19 and injected them into two groups of 14 of these mice. They then tracked the different doses of the virus and the resulting severity in the mice. The mice all developed severe symptoms including weight loss, lung injury, brain infection and death.2
This is the first time that scientists were able to find a lethal dose of COVID-19 for mice. The research was published in JCI Insight.2 “Given that the K18-hACE2 animal model is commercially available, it provides an important platform for evaluation of medical countermeasures across multiple laboratories,” Golden said.
Creating an animal model that follows the natural progression of severe COVID-19 infection is critical to early stage testing of potential vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
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