Join us on Tuesday 18 March for a lecture by Dr. Tami Jingshu Zhang from Erasmus MC (The Netherlands).
Date: Tuesday, March 18th 2025
Time: 16:30 - 18:00
Venue: Seminar Room 1B, Ground Floor, HKJC Building for Interdisciplinary Research, 5 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Abstract: The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 led to a global pandemic, and its persistence in the human population is anticipated for the foreseeable future. The common cold human coronavirus OC43, on the other hand, has been circulating in the human population for more than 100 years. Despite both viruses having zoonotic origins and targeting the human respiratory tract, they cause very different clinical outcomes, with OC43 causing only mild symptoms and occasional small outbreaks. The factors driving the differential pathogenesis between SARS-CoV-2 and OC43 have not yet fully been understood. To investigate the respiratory tract replication competence and cellular tropism of OC43 compared to SARS-CoV-2, clinical OC43 strains were isolated from patient nasal swabs using human bronchiolar organoid-derived cultures.
Human nasal organoids and human alveolar type 2 (AT2) organoids were used to assess viral replication at the upper and lower respiratory tract, respectively. OC43 replicated efficiently at human nasal organoids, albeit to a lesser extend compared to SARS-CoV-2. OC43 did not replicate in human AT2 organoids, whereas SARS-CoV-2 showed robust replication. Similar to SARS-CoV-2, OC43 mainly targeted ciliated cells in the nasal and bronchiolar organoids. Histochemical analysis of human respiratory tract tissues showed a high abundance of OC43 receptor expression in the nose, trachea, and bronchus, but not in the lung.
This differential receptor distribution likely accounts for the restricted permissiveness of the alveolar epithelium to OC43 infection. Using relevant organoid models, our results elucidate the differential tissue tropism of common cold virus OC43 within the human respiratory tract compared to highly-pathogenic SARS-CoV-2.
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