Breaking a virus into small pieces is usually enough to neutralize it. That is what the immune system does when tackling a cold caused by a common coronavirus. But the approach does not work against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, despite it being from the same family. Scientists from the University of California in Los Angeles and San Diego showed that the virus breaks down into fragments similar to antimicrobial peptides (AMP), which help trigger the human immune system’s inflammatory process to fight an invading pathogen. The viral particles have the same impact, causing tissue to self-destruct through excessive inflammation. The effect was seen in cells grown in a lab and in mice injected with the particles. The respiratory systems of patients with severe COVID-19 were full of them. The results, published in PNAS in February, shed new light on how some types of viruses work and how they can be tackled (NIH, February 27).
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