SARS-CoV-2 infection of primary human lung epithelium for COVID-19 modeling and drug discovery

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the latest respiratory pandemic resulting from zoonotic transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Severe symptoms include viral pneumonia secondary to infection and inflammation of the lower respiratory tract, in some cases causing death. We developed primary human lung epithelial infection models to understand responses of proximal and distal lung epithelium to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Differentiated air-liquid interface cultures of proximal airway epithelium and 3D organoid cultures of alveolar epithelium were readily infected by SARS-CoV-2 leading to an epithelial cell-autonomous proinflammatory response. We validated the efficacy of selected candidate COVID-19 drugs confirming that Remdesivir strongly suppressed viral infection/replication. We provide a relevant platform for studying COVID-19 pathobiology and for rapid drug screening against SARS-CoV-2 and future emergent respiratory pathogens. One Sentence Summary: A novel infection model of the adult human lung epithelium serves as a platform for COVID-19 studies and drug discovery.

Late Breaking Abstract - Tackling the diagnostic challenge of COVID-19 - beyond a 'false-negative'?

Background: The fast-evolving COVID-19 pandemic poses a significant diagnostic challenge all over the world. An understanding of the sensitivity/specificity of SARZ-CoV-2 RT-PCR helps to address the clinical challenges associated with the management of admissions with COVID-19. Aim: To determine the relative proportion of RT-PCR positive and negative adult hospital COVID-19 admissions and determine whether there are significant differences between them. Methods: In this retrospective cohort study we examined the demographics, clinical and biochemical characteristics of COVID-19 adult admissions to Barnet Hospital in the first month of the disease outbreak in the UK. SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-negative patients were diagnosed if alternative diagnosis was unlikely and 3 of 4 of the following were present: classical symptoms (new persistent cough) fever/tachypnea/hypoxia lymphopaenia CXR changes The primary endpoint was death at 30 days from initial presentation. Results: 572 patients were admitted with COVID-19, of whom 450 were RT-PCR positive (79%) and 122 were RT-PCR negative (21%). infection at Barnet Hospital in the first month. There was no significant difference in most of the studied parameters between the PCR-positive and PCR-negative COVID-19 patients. The only exception was the neutrophil count, which was found to be higher in the PCR-negative cohort (p<0.001). View inline Conclusion: Our study confirms that clinical criteria are effective in diagnosing COVID-19 in the presence of negative RT-PCR and has demonstrated no significant clinical differences between RT-PCR-positive and RT-PCR-negative COVID-19 admissions.

ReCOVery: A Multimodal Repository for COVID-19 News Credibility Research

First identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been declared as a global emergency in January, and a pandemic in March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO). Along with this pandemic, we are also experiencing an "infodemic" of information with low credibility such as fake news and conspiracies. In this work, we present ReCOVery, a repository designed and constructed to facilitate research on combating such information regarding COVID-19. We first broadly search and investigate ∼2,000 news publishers, from which 60 are identified with extreme [high or low] levels of credibility. By inheriting the credibility of the media on which they were published, a total of 2,029 news articles on coronavirus, published from January to May 2020, are collected in the repository, along with 140,820 tweets that reveal how these news articles have spread on the Twitter social network. The repository provides multimodal information of news articles on coronavirus, including textual, visual, temporal, and network information. The way that news credibility is obtained allows a trade-off between dataset scalability and label accuracy. Extensive experiments are conducted to present data statistics and distributions, as well as to provide baseline performances for predicting news credibility so that future methods can be compared. Our repository is available at http://coronavirus-fakenews.com. © 2020 ACM.

SARS-CoV-2 infection of primary human lung epithelium for COVID-19 modeling and drug discovery.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the latest respiratory pandemic resulting from zoonotic transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Severe symptoms include viral pneumonia secondary to infection and inflammation of the lower respiratory tract, in some cases causing death. We developed primary human lung epithelial infection models to understand responses of proximal and distal lung epithelium to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Differentiated air-liquid interface cultures of proximal airway epithelium and 3D organoid cultures of alveolar epithelium were readily infected by SARS-CoV-2 leading to an epithelial cell-autonomous proinflammatory response. We validated the efficacy of selected candidate COVID-19 drugs confirming that Remdesivir strongly suppressed viral infection/replication. We provide a relevant platform for studying COVID-19 pathobiology and for rapid drug screening against SARS-CoV-2 and future emergent respiratory pathogens. ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY: A novel infection model of the adult human lung epithelium serves as a platform for COVID-19 studies and drug discovery.