Australia develops nasal mucosal organoids to aid new coronavirus research

Xinhua News Agency, Sydney, February 6 (Reporter Hao Yalin Liu Shiyue) Australia's Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity recently released a press release saying that its researchers used human stem cells to grow nasal mucosal organoids in the laboratory to simulate and study the new crown The effects of the virus infecting the human body

Traditional methods of testing viral infections and treatments in conventional cell lines cannot accurately reflect the effects of the virus on a patient's body, the researchers said

Elizabeth Wankang, head of the laboratory at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and a professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who participated in the research, said that organoids are miniature organs grown from human stem cells, and organoid cells are closer to real cells

Therefore, in response to the characteristics of the new coronavirus infected by the respiratory tract, the researchers cultivated nasal mucosal organoids in the laboratory

The researchers found that the damage to the nasal mucosa epithelial cells by the mutated new coronavirus delta strain was significantly greater than that of the new coronavirus that did not mutate in the early stage

The researchers point out that the use of this organoid for research, which does not require invasive tissue sample collection, is a good model for preclinical research