Labs rush to study coronavirus in transgenic animals

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Labs rush to study coronavirus in transgenic animals

16 March 2020
News
With more than 110,000 confirmed human cases worldwide and no sign that the coronavirus is going away, researchers are looking to animals to understand COVID-19. They are testing monkeys, mice and even ferrets.

Research led by virologist Chao Shan at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Wuhan Institute of Virology, found that rhesus macaques infected with the coronavirus had a fairly mild illness. None developed fevers, but X-rays of their lungs showed signs of pneumonia similar to those in humans with COVID-19. This was confirmed after some of the monkeys were euthanized and their lungs dissected. The researchers killed two monkeys three days after infection and another pair after six days. They monitored two further animals for three weeks; these monkeys lost some weight, but didn’t seem to have other serious symptoms.

At least one lab with access to existing colonies of hACE2 mice has already begun infecting them with coronavirus. A team of researchers in China described initial results from infecting these mice in a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server last month. The mice, like rhesus monkeys, seemed to develop only mild illness, showing weight loss and signs of pneumonia but nothing more severe. 

Animals that develop only mild infections could be useful for testing drugs and vaccines, but they might not help scientists understand more severe cases, says Perlman. “It doesn’t really tell you much about how the virus causes disease.”