University of Cincinnati researchers hypothesize that low levels of amyloid-beta protein, not amyloid plaques, are to blame
New research from the University of Cincinnati (UC) and Karolinska Institute in Sweden challenges the prevailing theory about the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting the possibility of new avenues for the development of effective clinical laboratory assays, as well as effective therapies for treating patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Scientists have long theorized that the disease is caused by a buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain. These plaques are hardened forms of the amyloid-beta protein, according to a UC news story.
“The paradox is that so many of us accrue plaques in our brains as we age, and yet so few of us with plaques go on to develop dementia,” said Alberto Espay, MD, one of the lead researchers of the study, in another UC news story. Espay is Professor of Neurology at the UC College of Medicine and Director and Endowed Chair of the Gardner Center for Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders.
“Yet the plaques remain the center of our attention as it relates to biomarker development and therapeutic strategies,” he added.
“It’s only too logical, if you are detached from the biases that we’ve created for too long, that a neurodegenerative process is caused by something we lose, amyloid-beta, rather than something we gain, amyloid plaques,” said Alberto Espay, MD (above), in a University of Cincinnati news story. “Degeneration is a process of loss, and what we lose turns out to be much more important.” The UC study could lead to new clinical laboratory diagnostics, as well as treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. (Photo copyright: University of Cincinnati.)
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High Levels of Aβ42 Associated with Lower Dementia Risk
In their retrospective longitudinal study, the UC researchers looked at clinical assessments of individuals participating in the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN) cohort study. DIAN is an ongoing effort, sponsored by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, to identify biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s among people who carry Alzheimer’s mutations.
The researchers found that study participants with high levels of a soluble amyloid-beta protein, Aβ42, were less likely to develop dementia than those with lower levels of the protein, regardless of the levels of amyloid plaques in their brains or the amount of tau protein—either as phosphorylated tau (p-tau) or total tau (t-tau)—in their cerebral spinal fluid. P-tau and t-tau are proteins that form “tau tangles” in the brain that are also associated with Alzheimer’s.
One limitation of the study was that the researchers were unable to include Aβ40, another amyloid-beta protein, in their analysis. But they noted that this “did not limit the testing of our hypothesis since Aβ40 exhibits lower fibrillogenicity and lesser depletion than Aβ42, and is therefore less relevant to the process of protein aggregation than Aβ42.” Fibrillogenicity, in this context, refers to the process by which the amyloid-beta protein hardens into plaque.
While the presence of plaques may be correlated with Alzheimer’s, “Espay and his colleagues hypothesized that plaques are simply a consequence of the levels of soluble amyloid-beta in the brain decreasing,” UC news stated. “These levels decrease because the normal protein, under situations of biological, metabolic, or infectious stress, transform into the abnormal amyloid plaques.”
The UC News story also noted that many attempts to develop therapeutics for Alzheimer’s have focused on reducing amyloid plaques, but “in some clinical trials that reduced the levels of soluble amyloid-beta, patients showed worsening in clinical outcomes.”
New Therapeutics for Multiple Neurodegenerative Diseases
Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, recently announced phase three clinical trial results of lecanemab, an experimental drug jointly developed by Eisai and Biogen, claiming that the experimental Alzheimer’s drug modestly reduced cognitive decline in early-stage patients, according to NBC News.
Espay noted that lecanemab “does something that most other anti-amyloid treatments don’t do in addition to reducing amyloid: it increases the levels of the soluble amyloid-beta.” That may slow the process of soluble proteins hardening into plaques.
Beyond their findings about Alzheimer’s, the researchers believe similar mechanisms could be at work in other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, where the soluble alpha-synuclein protein also hardens into deposits.
“We’re advocating that what may be more meaningful across all degenerative diseases is the loss of normal proteins rather than the measurable fraction of abnormal proteins,” Espay said. “The net effect is a loss not a gain of proteins as the brain continues to shrink as these diseases progress.”
Espay foresees two approaches to treating these diseases: Rescue medicine, perhaps based on increasing levels of important proteins, and precision medicine, which “entails going deeper to understand what is causing levels of soluble amyloid-beta to decrease in the first place, whether it is a virus, a toxin, a nanoparticle, or a biological or genetic process,” according to UC News. “If the root cause is addressed, the levels of the protein wouldn’t need to be boosted because there would be no transformation from soluble, normal proteins to amyloid plaques.”
Clinical Laboratory Impact
What does this mean for clinical laboratories engaged in treatment of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients? A new understanding of the disease would create “the opportunity to identify new biomarkers and create new clinical laboratory tests that may help diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier in the disease progression, along with tests that help with the patient’s prognosis and monitoring his or her progression,” said Robert Michel, Editor-in-Chief of Dark Daily and its sister publication The Dark Report.
Given the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in the population, any clinical laboratory test cleared by the FDA would be a frequently-ordered assay, Michel noted. It also would create the opportunity for pathologists and clinical laboratories to provide valuable interpretation about the test results to the ordering physicians.
Similar health monitoring devices have been popular with chronic disease patients and physicians who treat them; this technology may give clinical laboratories a new diagnostic tool
There is an ever-increasing number of companies working to develop lab testing technologies that would be used outside of the traditional clinical laboratory. One such example is Nutromics, an Australia-based medical technology company which recently announced it has raised US $14 million to fund its new lab-on-a-patch platform, according to a company press release.
Nutromics’ lab-on-a-patch device “uses DNA sensor technology to track multiple targets in the human body, including disease biomarkers and hard-to-dose drugs,” according to MobiHealthNews. Notably, Nutromics’ technology uses interstitial fluid as the sample source.
Nutromics raised $4 million last year to support a manufacturing facility and an initial human clinical trial of its “continuous molecular monitoring (CMM) platform technology that is able to track multiple targets in the human body via a single wearable sensor. The platform provides real-time, continuous molecular-level insights for remote patient monitoring and hospital-at-home systems,” MobiHealthNews reported.
“We are aiming to cause a paradigm shift in diagnostic healthcare by essentially developing a lab-on-a-patch. A lack of timely and continuous diagnostic insights can strongly impact outcomes when dealing with critical disease states. With this strategic industry and VC (venture capital) investment in us, we see more confidence in our technology and hope to accelerate our growth,” said entrepreneur and chemical engineer Peter Vranes (above), co-founder and CEO of Nutromics, in a press release. Clinical laboratory leaders have watched similar biometric monitoring devices come to fruition. (Photo copyright: Nutromics.)
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How Nutromics’ Lab-on-a-Patch Works
“Our technology is, in fact, two technologies coming together—a marker and needle. What that does is give us access to fluid under your skin called interstitial fluid. If you’re going to measure something continuously, that’s a really good fluid [to measure],” Vranes told Outcomes Rocket.
Vranes calls the system’s aptamer-based sensor platform technology the “jewel in the crown.” An aptamer is a short sequence of artificial DNA or RNA that binds a specific target molecule. Nutromics’ aptamer sensor, Vranes said, enables targeting of analytes, unlike continuous glucose monitors (CGMs).
“[CGMs] are limited to metabolites—things that are already in the body like glucose and lactate. We’re not limited to those. We can do a whole range of different targets. And what that gives us is a ‘blue ocean’ opportunity to go in and solve problems in areas that other technologies just can’t solve,” Vranes said.
Nutromics plans to develop multiple aptamer-based sensors that measure a variety of analytes in interstitial fluid, Medtech Insight noted.
Nutromics’ wearable DNA sensor lab-on-a-patch technology (above) enables monitoring of multiple targets, including disease biomarkers and some medications, MobiHealthNews explained. The wearable patch contains microneedles that painlessly access interstitial fluid under the skin. Collected data is wirelessly transmitted to a software application and integrates with consumer health software and provider platforms, according to Nutromics. Medical laboratories could have a role in collecting this data and adding it other test results from patients using the wearable patch. (Photo copyright: Nutromics.)
Initial Launch Will Include Antibiotic Monitoring
Nutromics expects to initially launch therapeutic monitoring of vancomycin, a glycopeptide antibiotic medication used to treat various bacterial infections. The company says 60% of doses for this prescription antibiotic are not within therapeutic range.
“Interstitial fluid originates in the blood and then leaks out of capillaries to bring nutrients to cells in the body’s tissues. Because interstitial fluid is in direct communication with the cells, it should have information about the tissues themselves beyond what can be measured from testing the blood,” said Mark Prausnitz, PhD, Regents Professor and J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair, Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, in a 2020 news release announcing results of human trials of microneedle-based ISF sampling.
“We sampled interstitial fluid from 21 human participants and identified clinically relevant and sometimes distinct biomarkers in interstitial fluid when compared to companion plasma samples based on mass spectrometry analysis,” the scientists wrote.
Clinical laboratory leaders and pathologists will find it useful to monitor the development of diagnostics for use outside the lab. Nutromics is an example of a company developing wearable health technology that painlessly gathers data for lab tests to be conducted in point-of-care and near-patient settings.
Studies could lead to new prognostic biomarkers and clinical laboratory diagnostics for cancer
Might fungi be involved in human cancers? Two separately published studies have found fungal DNA in various cancers in the human body. However, the researchers are unclear on how the fungi got into the cancer cells and if it is affecting the cancers’ pathology. Nevertheless, these discoveries could lead to utilizing tumor-associated fungal DNA as clinical laboratory diagnostics or prognostic biomarkers in the fight against cancer.
“The finding that fungi are commonly present in human tumors should drive us to better explore their potential effects and re-examine almost everything we know about cancer through a ‘microbiome lens,’” said Ravid Straussman, MD, PhD (above), a principal investigator at Weizmann Institute of Science and one of the authors of the study in a UCSD press release. These findings could lead to new clinical laboratory diagnostics and prognostic biomarkers. (Photo copyright: Weizmann Institute of Science.)
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Microbiome Key to Cancer Biology and Detection
To perform their research, the team examined 17,401 samples of patient tissues, blood, and plasma across 35 different types of cancers in four independent cohorts. They discovered fungal DNA and cells in low abundances in many human cancers.
“The existence of fungi in most human cancers is both a surprise and to be expected,” said biologist Rob Knight, PhD, founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and Professor of Pediatrics and Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego in a UCSD press release. “It is surprising because we don’t know how fungi could get into tumors throughout the body. But it is also expected because it fits the pattern of healthy microbiomes throughout the body, including the gut, mouth and skin, where bacteria and fungi interact as part of a complex community.”
The main highlights of this study include:
Fungi detected in the different cancer types were often intracellular.
Multiple fungal-bacterial-immune ecologies were detected across tumors.
Intratumoral fungi stratified clinical outcomes, including immunotherapy response.
Cell-free fungal DNA found in both healthy and cancer patients in early-stage disease.
Fungi found on the human body appear as either environmental fungi, such as yeasts and molds, and commensal fungi, which live either on or inside the body. Both are typically harmless to most healthy people and can provide some benefits, such as improving gut health, but they may also be a contributing factor in some disease.
The researchers found that there were notable parallels between specific fungi and certain factors, such as age, tumor subtypes, smoking status, immunotherapy responses, and survival measures.
“These findings validate the view that the microbiome in its entirety is a key piece of cancer biology and may present significant translational opportunities, not only in cancer detection, but also in other biotech applications related to drug development, cancer evolution, minimal residual disease, relapse, and companion diagnostics,” said Gregory Sepich-Poore, MD, PhD, one of the study’s authors and co-founder and chief analytics officer at biotechnology company Micronoma, in the UCSD press release.
New Clinical Laboratory Tests to Identify Fungal Species in Cancer
Researchers from Duke University and Cornell University uncovered compelling evidence of fungi in multiple cancer types and focused on a detected link between Candida and gastrointestinal cancers.
They found that “several Candida species were enriched in tumor samples and tumor-associated Candida DNA was predictive of decreased survival,” according to their paper.
Their analysis of multiple body sites revealed tumor-associated mycobiomes in fungal cells. The researchers found that fungal spores known as blastomyces were associated with tumor tissues in lung cancers, and that high rates of Candida were present in stomach and colon cancers.
The Duke/Cornell researchers hope their work can provide a framework to develop new tests that can distinguish fungal species in tumors and predict cancer progression and help medical professionals and patients chose the best treatment therapies.
“These findings open up a lot of exciting research directions, from the development of diagnostics and treatments to studies of the detailed biological mechanisms of fungal relationships to cancers,” said Iliyan Iliev, PhD, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology in Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, and one of the authors of the study, in a Weill news release.
More research is needed to determine if fungal DNA plays a role in disease pathology or if its presence does not have any causal link.
“It’s plausible that some of these fungi are promoting tumor progression and metastasis, but even if they aren’t, they could be very valuable as prognostic indicators,” Iliev said.
The insights gleaned from these two studies will be of particular interest to microbiologists, clinical laboratory professionals, and anatomic pathologists. Additional research could answer questions about how and if fungi infect tumors and if such fungi is a factor that increases cancer risk and outcomes.
Proof-of-concept study ‘highlights that using AI to integrate different types of clinically informed data to predict disease outcomes is feasible’ researchers say
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are—in stepwise fashion—making progress in demonstrating value in the world of pathology diagnostics. But human anatomic pathologists are generally required for a prognosis. Now, in a proof-of-concept study, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have developed a method that uses AI models to integrate multiple types of data from disparate sources to accurately predict patient outcomes for 14 different types of cancer.
The process also uncovered “the predictive bases of features used to predict patient risk—a property that could be used to uncover new biomarkers,” according to Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News (GEN).
Should these research findings become clinically viable, anatomic pathologists may gain powerful new AI tools specifically designed to help them predict what type of outcome a cancer patient can expect.
“Experts analyze many pieces of evidence to predict how well a patient may do. These early examinations become the basis of making decisions about enrolling in a clinical trial or specific treatment regimens,” said Faisal Mahmood, PhD (above) in a Brigham press release. “But that means that this multimodal prediction happens at the level of the expert. We’re trying to address the problem computationally,” he added. Should they be proven clinically-viable through additional studies, these findings could lead to useful tools that help anatomic pathologists and clinical laboratory scientists more accurately predict what type of outcomes cancer patient may experience. (Photo copyright: Harvard.)
AI-based Prognostics in Pathology and Clinical Laboratory Medicine
The team at Brigham constructed their AI model using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a publicly available resource which contains data on many types of cancer. They then created a deep learning-based algorithm that examines information from different data sources.
Pathologists traditionally depend on several distinct sources of data, such as pathology images, genomic sequencing, and patient history to diagnose various cancers and help develop prognoses.
For their research, Mahmood and his colleagues trained and validated their AI algorithm on 6,592 H/E (hematoxylin and eosin) whole slide images (WSIs) from 5,720 cancer patients. Molecular profile features, which included mutation status, copy-number variation, and RNA sequencing expression, were also inputted into the model to measure and explain relative risk of cancer death.
The scientists “evaluated the model’s efficacy by feeding it data sets from 14 cancer types as well as patient histology and genomic data. Results demonstrated that the models yielded more accurate patient outcome predictions than those incorporating only single sources of information,” states a Brigham press release.
“This work sets the stage for larger healthcare AI studies that combine data from multiple sources,” said Faisal Mahmood, PhD, Associate Professor, Division of Computational Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Associate Member, Cancer Program, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in the press release. “In a broader sense, our findings emphasize a need for building computational pathology prognostic models with much larger datasets and downstream clinical trials to establish utility.”
Future Prognostics Based on Multiple Data Sources
The Brigham researchers also generated a research tool they dubbed the Pathology-omics Research Platform for Integrative Survival Estimation (PORPOISE). This tool serves as an interactive platform that can yield prognostic markers detected by the algorithm for thousands of patients across various cancer types.
The researchers believe their algorithm reveals another role for AI technology in medical care, but that more research is needed before their model can be implemented clinically. Larger data sets will have to be examined and the researchers plan to use more types of patient information, such as radiology scans, family histories, and electronic medical records in future tests of their AI technology.
“Future work will focus on developing more focused prognostic models by curating larger multimodal datasets for individual disease models, adapting models to large independent multimodal test cohorts, and using multimodal deep learning for predicting response and resistance to treatment,” the Cancer Cell paper states.
“As research advances in sequencing technologies, such as single-cell RNA-seq, mass cytometry, and spatial transcriptomics, these technologies continue to mature and gain clinical penetrance, in combination with whole-slide imaging, and our approach to understanding molecular biology will become increasingly spatially resolved and multimodal,” the researchers concluded.
Anatomic pathologists may find the Brigham and Women’s Hospital research team’s findings intriguing. An AI tool that integrates data from disparate sources, analyzes that information, and provides useful insights, could one day help them provide more accurate cancer prognoses and improve the care of their patients.
Study also may have found relationship between atherosclerosis and cholesterol
Chinese scientists have developed a cutting-edge method for non-invasively monitoring blood cholesterol levels in humans. The innovative technology utilizes images of skin on hands and may eliminate the need for both invasive venipunctures and fasting for testing cholesterol. Given the large volumes of blood cholesterol tests currently performed by clinical laboratories, this new technology could have significant impact on cholesterol testing if further studies confirm its capabilities.
Notably, the Chinese researchers have apparently already developed a lab analyzer to perform the procedure and it is being used in clinical care. However, in the United States and other countries, this technology will require additional clinical studies and regulatory review before clinical laboratories would be able to use it in daily patient care.
The cholesterol sensing system consists of a detection reagent associated with a fluorescent group that binds to skin cholesterol, and a detection device. Cholesterol levels are easily obtained from the skin, according to the researchers, by analyzing the manner in which the skin absorbs and scatters light via a scanner.
Should this technology be validated for clinical care, it could replace other invasive clinical laboratory tests for cholesterol measurement.
The series of images above, taken from the researchers’ Lipids in Health and Disease published study, demonstrates how their non-invasive clinical laboratory test for total blood cholesterol is performed. Non-invasive clinical laboratory tests for monitoring biomarkers in the blood are always preferred by patients over veinous punctures and fasting. (Photo copyright: Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences.)
First Evidence of Relationship between Cholesterol and Atherosclerosis
“Just put your hands on, and the system will tell you the cholesterol data,” Yikun Wang, PhD, Professor, Department of Physical Sciences, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and leader of the research team, told Diagnostics World. “Cholesterol is one of several types of fats (lipids) that play an important role in human body, we can track your fats in this simple way.”
To perform the testing, clinicians first clean the test site located on the fleshy edge of the palm of the hand with an alcohol swab. A patient’s non-dominant hand is used for the test as the skin on that hand is typically less abrasive and contains fewer melanocytes, which allows for more stable results. A plastic-coated annulus is then applied to the test site and the examined portion is positioned on the measuring hole of the detection system to measure the background light spectrum of the skin.
Once the background signal is ascertained, the detection reagent is added to the annulus until it is full. After 60 seconds, any excess detection reagent is removed from the annulus. A cleaning reagent is then added to the annulus for 30 seconds and removed with a sterile cotton swab. The treated portion of the skin is then placed over the measuring hole of the detection system and two spectrums of light are compared to measure the skin cholesterol, which accurately correlates to the cholesterol in the bloodstream.
“Compared to in-situ detection used in the previous clinical research, our device may offer more accurate results for we can avoid the influence of pressure and skin background differences [person to person],” Wang said. “Study results offer the first evidence of a relationship between skin cholesterol and atherosclerotic disease in a Chinese population, which may be of great significance to researchers around the world.”
Initially, 154 patients diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) between January 2020 and April 2021 were involved in the study. However, only 121 of those patients were included in the final study with the remaining being excluded due to at least one of the following criteria:
Severe hepatic (liver) or renal (kidney) insufficiency, and
Obesity.
Clinician Use Can Affect Accuracy of Test
Developed by researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Science and Technology of China, the researchers noted that how clinicians operate the device can have an impact on the accuracy of the test results.
“A critical step in the [testing] process that is subject to operator variability is blotting, which requires the operator to remove an unbound detector from the palm before adding the indicator,” Wang told Diagnostics World. “Excess residual indicator solution can result in falsely increased skin cholesterol levels. Considering this, we are planning to develop a simplified and standardized blotting procedure.”
Millions of people in the US live with illness that requires regular monitoring of blood cholesterol. Normal total cholesterol should be less than 200 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 94 million US adults over the age of 20 have total cholesterol levels higher than 200 mg/dL and 28 million adults have total cholesterol levels higher than 240 mg/dL. In addition, 7% of children and adolescents between the ages of six and 19 have high cholesterol. For these reasons, cholesterol testing represents a substantial portion of the clinical laboratory tests performed daily in this country.
This new non-invasive technology for monitoring total blood cholesterol in humans could greatly benefit patients, especially if it eliminates the need for venipunctures and fasting prior to testing. Clinical laboratory managers and pathologists may want to follow the progress of this new cholesterol testing technology as it demonstrates its value in China and is submitted for regulatory review in this country.
Findings could lead to new clinical laboratory involvement in diagnostics targeted at overweight patients
Does the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus make us fat so it can better take over our bodies? It sounds like the plot for a science fiction horror movie! But a team of scientists in the Pacific Northwest say that is exactly what the virus does, and their findings could lead to clinical laboratories playing a role in evaluating how the virus highjacks fat cells to aid in its invasion of humans.
They found that certain types of lipids support replication of the COVID-19 virus. Their study illustrates how lipids may play a more important role in the human body than scientists previously understood.
“This is exciting work, but it’s the start of a very long journey,” said Fikadu Tafesse, PhD (left), Assistant Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, OHSU School of Medicine and corresponding author of the study in an OHSU press release. “We have an interesting observation, but we have a lot more to learn about the mechanisms of this disease.” Clinical laboratories may eventually be part of a new diagnostic process for overweight COVID-19 patients. (Photo copyright: Oregon Health and Science University.)
Does Obesity Promote COVID-19 Infection?
The OHSU and PNNL scientists performed their research by examining the effect of SARS-CoV-2 on more than 400 lipids in two different cell lines. They observed that individuals with a high body mass index (BMI) appear to be more sensitive to the COVID-19 virus.
The researchers discovered there is a tremendous shift in lipid levels in those cell lines when the virus was present, with some fats increasing by a massive 64 times! Nearly 80% of the fats in one cell line were changed by the virus and more than half of the fats were altered in the other cell line.
The lipids that were most affected by the COVID-19 virus were triglycerides which are critical to human health. Triglycerides are basically tiny bundles of fat that allow the body to store energy and maintain healthy cell membranes. When a body needs energy, these fat parcels are broken up into useful, raw materials to provide the required energy.
“Lipids are an important part of every cell. They literally hold us together by keeping our cells intact, and they’re a major source of energy storage for our bodies,” said Jennifer Kyle, PhD, in the OHSU press release. Kyle is a research scientist at PNNL who specializes in all stages of lipidomic research. “They are an attractive target for a virus,” she noted.
Stopping SARS-CoV-2 Replication
The scientists discovered that SARS-CoV-2 alters our fat-processing system by boosting the number of triglycerides in our cells and changing the body’s ability to utilize stored fat as fuel. The team also analyzed the effects of lipid levels in 24 of the virus’ 29 proteins. They identified several proteins that had a strong influence on triglyceride levels.
The team then searched databases and identified several compounds that interfered with the body’s fat-processing system by cutting off the flow of fatty fuel. They found that several of these compounds were successful at stopping the SARS-CoV-2 virus from replicating.
A synthetic organic compound known as GSK2194069, which selectively and potently inhibits fatty acid synthase (FAS), and a weight-loss medication called Orlistat, were both able to stop viral replication in the lab.
Although the scientists believe their work is an important step in understanding the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, they also note that their results occurred in cell culture (in vitro) and not in people (in vivo). Therefore, more research is needed to determine if the compounds will work in the same manner in human trials.
“As the virus replicates, it needs a continuous supply of energy. More triglycerides could provide that energy in the form of fatty acids. But we don’t know exactly how the virus uses these lipids to its advantage,” Tafesse said in the press release.
“Our findings fill an important gap in our understanding of host dependency factors of coronavirus infection. … In light of the evolving nature of SARS-CoV-2, it is critical that we understand the basic biology of its life cycle in order to illuminate additional avenues for protection and therapy against this global pandemic pathogen, which spreads quickly and mutates with ease,” the OHSU/PNNL scientists wrote in Nature Communications.
More research is needed to validate the findings of this study and to better understand the dynamic between lipids and SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, it is reasonable to assume that, in the future, some COVID-19 patients may require a clinical laboratory work-up to determine how the coronavirus may be hijacking their fat cells to exacerbate the illness.
