Researchers have finally unravelled why those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are at higher risk of developing severe coronavirus, an advance that could lead to the development of new therapeutic interventions to reduce the infection in patients with the lung condition.
They have observed that in inflammatory lung condition, COPD causes airway blockage following difficulty in breathing. It may affect nearly 400 million people worldwide.
The researchers from the Centenary Institute and the University of Technology Sydney in Australia have discovered that the COPD airway cells had 24-fold greater infection with SARS-CoV-2 than the healthy cells.
In the study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the researchers infected differentiated airway cells from COPD patients and healthy people with SARS-CoV-2. "We examined the genetic information of infected cells through advanced single cell RNA-sequencing analysis," said study lead author Matt Johansen, from the Centenary UTS Centre for Inflammation. "Seven days after SARS-CoV-2 infection, there was a 24-fold increase of viral load in the COPD patient airway cells compared to the cells taken from healthy individuals," Johansen said.