Massive single-cell study suggests biological roots of COVID-19 risk factors

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It’s rare for current events to inform the work of scientists as acutely as during a pandemic. In February 2020, a team of scientists from the international initiative of the Human Cell Atlas, including scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, sifted through a dataset on healthy human cells to look for ones the SARS-CoV-2 virus might be infecting. Initial searches (described in Nature Medicine and Cell) had turned up cells in the nose, lung, and airway, and surprisingly also in other tissues, including the intestines, liver, eye, kidney, brain, and heart.

“We were seeing these cells in places like the brain or olfactory epithelium, which enables the sense of smell,” said Broad core institute member Aviv Regev and co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas. The puzzled scientists contacted colleagues to see if they’d come across any COVID-19 patients with symptoms in these unexpected tissues, but soon found clues in the headlines. “Sure enough, a few days later we read in the newspaper that patients were reporting the loss of ability to smell, now known to be a common sign of coronavirus infection,” recalled Regev, who now heads research and early development at Genentech.

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