Liuliu Yang, Tae Wan Kim, Yuling Han, Manoj S Nair, Oliver Harschnitz, Jiajun Zhu, Pengfei Wang, So Yeon Koo, Lauretta A Lacko, Vasuretha Chandar, Yaron Bram, Tuo Zhang, Wei Zhang, Feng He, Chendong Pan, Junjie Wu, Yaoxing Huang, Todd Evans, Paul van der Valk, Maarten J Titulaer, Jochem K H Spoor, Robert L Furler O'Brien, Marianna Bugiani, Wilma D J Van de Berg, Robert E Schwartz, David D Ho, Lorenz Studer, Shuibing Chen
COVID-19 patients commonly present with signs of central nervous system and/or peripheral nervous system dysfunction. Here, we show that midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons derived from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) are selectively susceptible and permissive to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. SARS-CoV-2 infection of DA neurons triggers an inflammatory and cellular senescence response. High-throughput screening in hPSC-derived DA neurons identified several FDA-approved drugs that can rescue the cellular senescence phenotype by preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection...
January 10, 2024: Cell Stem Cell