July 28, 2020 by Sam Bazzi Since our lab has begun studies on COVID-19 during the past month, I must apologize to my readers for not posting as frequently. It’s been very exciting to finally get back in the lab regularly, but I only wish that it was under more pleasant circumstances (and without N95 face bruises). Nonetheless, I will be posting again regularly now that we’ve gotten into the rhythm of processing samples. This week, I was thinking about viral propagation in the CNS. I’ve written previously about how different human coronavirus (HCoV) strains have been demonstrated to exist …
SARS-CoV-2 infects neurons in vitro
July 13, 2020 by Sam Bazzi A study published recently in ALTEX demonstrates that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can invade neurons expressing the ACE2 receptor using a BrainSphere in vitro model. BrainSpheres are essentially tiny models of the brain that are produced from human inducible pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells can differentiate into neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes to form a 3D co-culture. These cultures have the potential for being standardized and mass-produced, which make them a very useful model to study neural processes. The authors of this study utilized …
Ischemic Strokes in Young People with COVID-19
June 23, 2020 by Sam Bazzi Another week, another study on horrifying brain injuries associated with COVID-19… Let’s get started. Although I’ve mentioned reports of stroke in previous reviews of neurological symptoms in COVID, I have not yet covered the published case reports describing ischemia. A case study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine that described cases of large-vessel stroke in young patients (<50 years old), with one of the patients being a 33 year-old woman with no previous health problems (Oxley et al., 2020). Five patients described in this study tested …