Back

Novel ACE2 nanoparticles universally block SARS-CoV-2 variants in the human respiratory tract

Sauvanet, C.; Lemos, M.; Bezault, A.; Rodriguez de Francisco, B.; Chan, M. C.; Hui, K. P.; Ng, K.-c.; Nicholls, J. M.; Volkmann, N.; Hanein, D.

2022-10-05 cell biology
10.1101/2022.05.05.490805 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The continual evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has challenged the efficacy of many COVID19 vaccines and treatment options. One strategy that evades viral escape is using the entry receptor, human Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 (hACE2). Soluble hACE2 receptor domains show potential as decoys but genetic modifications are necessary to provide sufficient efficacy. However, these engineered constructs are potentially susceptible to viral escape. We combined native hACE2 with viral vectors to form nanoparticles presenting hACE2 analogous to human cells. Cell-based viral infection assays and cryogenic in-situ tomography show that hACE2 nanoparticles sequester viruses through aggregation, efficiently blocking entry of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants in model cell systems and human respiratory tract explants using native hACE2. Thus, we show that hACE2 nanoparticles have high potential as pan-variant COVID19 therapeutics.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.