Why does Sars-CoV-2 have such a serious impact on human health compared to other respiratory viruses? This is the question from which the researchers of the Ifom of Milan and the Cnr-Igm of Pavia started, with the contribution of the virologists of the Icgeb of Trieste, to find out what are the molecular basis of its aggressiveness and the deleterious effects it causes .
The study, published in the authoritative scientific journal Nature Cell Biology, concluded that the coronavirus violates cell systems, damages its DNA and prevents it from being repaired, causing aging and inflammation. The authors define it a real “hacking operation”, which could be useful to know with a view to developing new pharmacological strategies aimed at limiting the effects of Sars-CoV-2.
«All viruses, as we know, are parasites. They enter a cell and begin to exploit everything that is made available by the infected cell to replicate and spread – explains Fabrizio d’Adda of Fagagna, head of the Ifom laboratory “Response to DNA damage and cellular senescence” and research manager at ‘ Igm-Cnr of Pavia – And Sars-CoV-2 is a particularly greedy and skilled virus. In our laboratory we wondered how this hacking operation by the virus and whether there is a connection with those processes that we study every day in only apparently distant pathological areas, such as tumors, genetic diseases and conditions related to aging: all events united by the accumulation of damage to the DNA».
Starting from these premises, the first authors Ubaldo Gioia and Sara Tavella, Ifom researchers, have identified, through the use of different in vitro cellular systems, the molecular causes underlying the deleterious effects of Covidand they found confirmation in vivo, both in mouse model systems of infection and in post-mortem tissues derived from Covid patients.
«What we have observed – illustrate Gioia and Tavella – is that Once Sars-CoV-2 enters the cell, it hijacks its fundamental processes, forcing it to stop producing deoxynucleotides, the “building blocks” of DNA, to make them produce ribonucleotides or the “bricks” that are used to synthesize the RNA of the cell and, above all, that of the virus. It is precisely this alteration of the cellular process operated by the virus to its advantage that allows the explosive viral replication within the infected cell.