ABSTRACT
Safety monitoring is of paramount importance for vaccines authorized for emergent use (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) against SARS-CoV-2. Mass immunization is an essential tool to end the current pandemic, but vaccine surveillance is necessary to identify any potentially associated harms. At the same time, probability of temporal bias should be borne in mind before making conclusions about causality between the vaccine and an attributable undesired effect. We report a case of Guillain-Barré syndrome after the first dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and believe this is a temporal, rather than causal association.
ABSTRACT
Recent clinical data have suggested a correlation between coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and diabetes. Here, we describe the detection of SARS-CoV-2 viral antigen in pancreatic beta cells in autopsy samples from individuals with COVID-19. Single-cell RNA sequencing and immunostaining from ex vivo infections confirmed that multiple types of pancreatic islet cells were susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, eliciting a cellular stress response and the induction of chemokines. Upon SARS-CoV-2 infection, beta cells showed a lower expression of insulin and a higher expression of alpha and acinar cell markers, including glucagon and trypsin1, respectively, suggesting cellular transdifferentiation. Trajectory analysis indicated that SARS-CoV-2 induced eIF2-pathway-mediated beta cell transdifferentiation, a phenotype that could be reversed with trans-integrated stress response inhibitor (trans-ISRIB). Altogether, this study demonstrates an example of SARS-CoV-2 infection causing cell fate change, which provides further insight into the pathomechanisms of COVID-19.
Subject(s)
COVID-19/virology , Cell Transdifferentiation , Insulin-Secreting Cells/virology , SARS-CoV-2/pathogenicity , Acetamides/pharmacology , Adolescent , Adult , Aged , Aged, 80 and over , Animals , COVID-19/mortality , Cell Transdifferentiation/drug effects , Chlorocebus aethiops , Cyclohexylamines/pharmacology , Cytokines/metabolism , Eukaryotic Initiation Factor-2/metabolism , Female , Glucagon , Host-Pathogen Interactions , Humans , Insulin/metabolism , Insulin-Secreting Cells/drug effects , Insulin-Secreting Cells/metabolism , Insulin-Secreting Cells/pathology , Male , Middle Aged , Phenotype , Signal Transduction , Tissue Culture Techniques , Trypsin/metabolism , Vero Cells , Young AdultABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. Following this, there has been a rapid development in policies and strategies to contain and mitigate the pandemic. One of such strategies involves the development and utilization of testing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative organism of COVID-19. In this article, we explore the diagnostic modalities for COVID-19 based on the available information to date.