Pangolins blamed for transmitting coronavirus from bats to humans may be IMMUNE to the disease
Pangolins — the animals blamed for first transmitting coronavirus from bats to humans — may be immune to the deadly disease, a study has claimed.
This means pangolins — which lack two virus-sensing genes, meaning they can carry the virus without necessarily suffering — may hold the key to beating COVID-19.
Working in a similar fashion to a smoke detectors, these genes sense when a virus enters the body and raises the alarm, triggering an immune response.
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A popular origin theory for coronavirus is that it jumped from a pangolin to a human at a wet market in Wuhan, a wildlife market that sold live, exotic animals.
Investigating the theory, researchers analysed the genome sequence of pangolins and compared it to other mammals — including humans, cats, dogs and cattle.
‘Our work shows that pangolins have survived through millions of years of evolution without a type of antiviral defence that is used by all other mammals,’ said paper author Leopold Eckhart, of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.
‘Further studies of pangolins will uncover how they manage to survive viral infections, and this might help to devise new treatment strategies for people with viral infections.’
In humans, COVID-19 can cause an inflammatory immune response — called a cytokine storm — which worsens a patient’s condition.
Pharmaceutical suppression of gene signalling, the authors suggest, could be a possible treatment option for severe cases
However, Dr Eckhart cautioned that such an approach could open the door to secondary infections.
‘The main challenge is to reduce the response to the pathogen while maintaining sufficient control of the virus,’ he said.
An overactivated immune system can be moderated, Dr Eckhart added, ‘by reducing the intensity or by changing the timing of the defence reaction.’
While the study identified genetic differences between pangolins and other mammals, it did not investigate the impact of those differences on the antiviral response.
Scientists don’t yet understand how exactly pangolins survive coronavirus, only that their lack of these two signalling genes might have something to do with it.
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.
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