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The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has brought infected millions worldwide Over 6 million individuals in the US have been infected by the SARS-CoV2 making it the worst-hit country across the globe While there is an urgent need to find a potential therapy/vaccine it is important to understand the disease progression and susceptibilities to enable better the disease management In this respect, smokers or vapers could be considered as the worst affected population as they are highly prone to respiratory infections However, the clinical data relating COVID-19 occurrence and severity amongst smokers/vapers is quite limited We thus hypothesized that dysregulated ACE2 expression and weakened immunity could result in severe disease outcomes amongst smokers To test this hypothesis, we collected the blood serum samples from COVID19 positive and COVID-19 recovered patients with and without a smoking history We assayed the expression and activity of ACE2 ACE2 is the membrane-bound receptor on pneumocytes and lung epithelium that binds to the SARS-CoV2 spike protein and is responsible for the viral entry into the host cell This viral entry and fusion occur due to the activity of membrane proteases like furin and TMPRSS2 Results: Our initial investigations show increased Furin activity amongst the COVID19 positive patients with a smoking history as compared to the non-smoking controls We further observed a significant dysregulation in the ACE2 activity of COVID-19 patients as compared to COVID-19 recovered patient group Smoking habit was found to dramatically affect the ACE2 activity amongst COVID-19 positive group We are presently comparing the expression levels of systemic inflammatory mediators (IL8 and IL6) amongst our various experimental groups to compare the severity of inflammatory responses amongst smokers and non-smokers Overall, our findings show that the onset and progression of COVID-19 varies amongst smokers doi: xxxxx
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Free_Radical_Biology_and_Medicine
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Dysregulated ACE2 and Furin Activity amongst Smokers Increase Disease Susceptibility Towards SARS-CoV2
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