New Cell Atlas of COVID-19 Pathology Reveals How the Coronavirus “Wreaks Havoc in the Lungs”

Lung Infection Illustration

Scientists studied cells from COVID-19 patients who died, finding various molecular and genomic changes in infected cells across multiple organs. They also observed unsuccessful lung repair attempts in response to respiratory failure.

Single-cell analysis of autopsy samples from COVID-19 patients shows how the lungs repeatedly tried, and failed, to repair themselves.

Scientists from several hospitals and research centers have shown what happens in individual cells of patients who died of COVID-19. In a study published in Nature, the researchers describe how infected cells from multiple organs exhibited a range of molecular and genomic changes. They also saw signs of multiple, unsuccessful attempts by the lungs to repair themselves in response to respiratory failure, which is the leading cause of death in COVID-19 patients.

“You really feel the tragedy of the disease when you see that result,” said Aviv Regev, co-senior author of the study and a core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard when the study began. “The lung tries everything at its disposal, and it still can’t fix itself. This was a very emotional study. We are grateful to the patients and families who agreed to donate tissue for COVID-19 research to help advance understanding of this devastating disease.” 

The researchers studied tissue obtained at autopsies of 17 individuals who succumbed to COVID-19 and were cared for at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Lung Tissue From Deceased COVID-19 Patients

Researchers profiled lung tissue from deceased COVID-19 patients and zoomed in on key regions and structures of interest. Credit: Domenic Abbondanza

The team investigated how the SARS-CoV-2 virus interferes with the function of cells and their genetic programs. They used single-cell RNA sequencing data from tissue samples taken from 11 organ systems—including the lungs, heart, liver, and kidneys—to build a comprehensive “cell atlas” of hundreds of thousands of individual cells showing how COVID-19 can lead to organ failure and death.

“We knew people were passing away from COVID-related pneumonia and extrapulmonary complications,” said Alexandra-Chloé Villani, an associate member of the Broad, a principal investigator at Mass General, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and co-senior author on the study. “Before this study, we had limited knowledge of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that were involved in driving a patient’s demise.”

The study details the results of a collaboration of researchers from the Broad Institute, Mass General, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, MIT, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and other institutions. A team led by the Columbia collaborators co-authored a companion study that is also published in Nature.

The team’s cell atlas is freely and openly available for other scientists to explore. They also created a 420-specimen biobank from the autopsy samples that can be used for other COVID-19 studies. “We created a foundational resource for other researchers to use in the future to ask specific questions,” said Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen, co-senior author and an institute scientist and the scientific director of the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad when the study began. “Hopefully our findings will allow people to find better therapeutics for COVID-19.” 

Novel Techniques for a Novel Virus

To learn about cellular mechanisms underlying organ failure caused by COVID-19, the researchers knew they needed to study the organs themselves. For that, they would need samples from autopsies.

Working with autopsy samples is challenging under normal circumstances. To deal with samples that might carry a novel, highly contagious pathogen, the researchers developed new tissue collection and processing protocols compatible with requirements for a Biosafety Level 3 lab.

“We wanted to ensure we could learn and share as much as humanly possible to help prevent future deaths, while prioritizing the safety and well-being of all involved. This was no small feat, given COVID-related restrictions and all the surrounding uncertainties. It was amazing to see dozens of scientists and medical professionals from several institutes come together as a collaborative partnership to carefully design and coordinate our experimental and computational efforts,” said institute member and co-senior author Alex K. Shalek, who is also a member of the Ragon Institute, and an associate professor of chemistry, a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

The team then profiled RNA from the individual cells and developed new methods to analyze and annotate the large amounts of sequence data. They compared gene expression signatures from different cells: COVID-19-damaged cells and uninfected cells from the COVID-19 patients, as well as cells from patients with other diseases and from healthy individuals.

Havoc in the Lungs

The most extensive suite of findings were from the lungs. The scientists were astounded by the extent of the changes in genetic programs they found there. “The virus wreaks havoc in the lungs and we see it in the cells,” Regev said.

One main cause of lung damage in COVID-19 is the destruction of AT1 cells, which enable breathing and gas transfer. The scientists found that as AT1 cells died, related lung cells called AT2 attempted to convert themselves into AT1 cells through a process called transdifferentiation. But this attempt halted mid-way through, leaving the cells in an intermediary state that is often seen in patients with other lung diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis.

In a last-ditch attempt at self-repair, the lungs tried to turn cells from higher up in the airways, known as intrapulmonary basal-like progenitor cells, into AT1 cells. This attempt at transdifferentiation had only previously been seen in mouse models.

The findings suggest that the lung failure in patients was caused by the inability of lung cells to outpace the damage caused by the virus as the cells tried to regenerate.

Changing Programs

The paper also describes how the virus impacts other tissues outside of the lungs. One surprising finding was that while the heart sustained significant damage and showed evidence of altered genetic programs in many different cell types, there was very little viral RNA in the heart tissue itself. “Whether that means the virus had already been cleared, or that the heart was collateral damage is an area for further research,” said Regev.

The researchers also looked at 27 different genes that previous genome-wide association studies have linked to severe COVID-19. They zeroed in on a handful that were highly expressed in key cell types in the new study, particularly those in infected lungs. This finding helps narrow down the list of potential genetic factors for severe disease and highlights the cell types that may be most relevant in severe COVID-19.

The team now plans to finish analyzing the other autopsied tissues, such as brain, spleen, and trachea, to paint a more complete picture of COVID-19 pathology and provide a resource for future studies.

For more on this research, read New Cell Atlas of COVID Lungs Reveals Why SARS-CoV-2 Is Different and Deadly.

Reference: “COVID-19 tissue atlases reveal SARS-CoV-2 pathology and cellular targets” by Toni M. Delorey, Carly G. K. Ziegler, Graham Heimberg, Rachelly Normand, Yiming Yang, Åsa Segerstolpe, Domenic Abbondanza, Stephen J. Fleming, Ayshwarya Subramanian, Daniel T. Montoro, Karthik A. Jagadeesh, Kushal K. Dey, Pritha Sen, Michal Slyper, Yered H. Pita-Juárez, Devan Phillips, Jana Biermann, Zohar Bloom-Ackermann, Nikolaos Barkas, Andrea Ganna, James Gomez, Johannes C. Melms, Igor Katsyv, Erica Normandin, Pourya Naderi, Yury V. Popov, Siddharth S. Raju, Sebastian Niezen, Linus T.-Y. Tsai, Katherine J. Siddle, Malika Sud, Victoria M. Tran, Shamsudheen K. Vellarikkal, Yiping Wang, Liat Amir-Zilberstein, Deepak S. Atri, Joseph Beechem, Olga R. Brook, Jonathan Chen, Prajan Divakar, Phylicia Dorceus, Jesse M. Engreitz, Adam Essene, Donna M. Fitzgerald, Robin Fropf, Steven Gazal, Joshua Gould, John Grzyb, Tyler Harvey, Jonathan Hecht, Tyler Hether, Judit Jané-Valbuena, Michael Leney-Greene, Hui Ma, Cristin McCabe, Daniel E. McLoughlin, Eric M. Miller, Christoph Muus, Mari Niemi, Robert Padera, Liuliu Pan, Deepti Pant, Carmel Pe’er, Jenna Pfiffner-Borges, Christopher J. Pinto, Jacob Plaisted, Jason Reeves, Marty Ross, Melissa Rudy, Erroll H. Rueckert, Michelle Siciliano, Alexander Sturm, Ellen Todres, Avinash Waghray, Sarah Warren, Shuting Zhang, Daniel R. Zollinger, Lisa Cosimi, Rajat M. Gupta, Nir Hacohen, Hanina Hibshoosh, Winston Hide, Alkes L. Price, Jayaraj Rajagopal, Purushothama Rao Tata, Stefan Riedel, Gyongyi Szabo, Timothy L. Tickle, Patrick T. Ellinor, Deborah Hung, Pardis C. Sabeti, Richard Novak, Robert Rogers, Donald E. Ingber, Z. Gordon Jiang, Dejan Juric, Mehrtash Babadi, Samouil L. Farhi, Benjamin Izar, James R. Stone, Ioannis S. Vlachos, Isaac H. Solomon, Orr Ashenberg, Caroline B. M. Porter, Bo Li, Alex K. Shalek, Alexandra-Chloé Villani, Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen and Aviv Regev, 29 April 2021, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03570-8

Aviv Regev is now Executive Vice President, Genentech Research and Early Development.

Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen is now Executive Director and Head of Cellular and Tissue Genomics at Genentech.

Support for this research was provided in part by the Manton Foundation, Klarman Family Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Human Tumor Atlas Network trans-network projects SARDANA (Shared Repositories, Data, Analysis and Access), DARPA, and the US Food and Drug Administration.

8 Comments on "New Cell Atlas of COVID-19 Pathology Reveals How the Coronavirus “Wreaks Havoc in the Lungs”"

  1. It’s almost been one year after being sick, and I still can’t run due to lungs.

  2. Jock Campbell | June 12, 2021 at 3:29 pm | Reply

    This paper say absolutely nothing of worth.

    Nowhere does it account for these patients’ ages or co-morbidities. It is impossible to take the information as presented and accept that it refers to ordinarily healthy adults who have contracted a viral infection (for which we STILL have no empirical evidence). These patients might well have all been in their nineties and loaded up on antiviral drugs that destroyed their bodies’ capacity to heal from a perfectly common influenza.

    See Dr Sam Bailey’s Youtube report on ‘Excess mortality’. It’s eye-opening.

    • I don’t know, it’s tough to choose between 109 PhD authors and 1 discredited doctor who’s been called out for lying several times.

      This isn’t a movie where the underdog fights against adversity and emerges to become the one true hero of humanity.

      • Jock Campbell | June 13, 2021 at 3:10 am | Reply

        You’ll be presenting evidence then?

      • She is *mostly* right about what she says. What you see is Ad Hominem attacks, no actual counter arguments to her statements.

        I don’t think it invalidates this study. Maybe you could argue that the treatments people in this study were given contributed to the damage on the tissues and/or the people didn’t have covid but actually other disease and it was the primary cause of the observations. I would say it’s very unlikely that this is the case.

        • There is no reason for me to produce evidence when it has been produced by her peers, but if there’s a need for some basic one, she does not publish research but instead posts on youtube, a behavior that has been marked as a big red flag in the medical community for the past year or more.

          This assessment is no more ad hominem than a credit report or arrest record, and to cast it as such in an attempt to lend credibility to a quack is extremely unprofessional. She’s made her own bed and white knighting will not save her from herself.

    • Read the actual paper then…
      Yes it has limitations
      “Our study was limited by a modest number of donors without pre-selection of features, the terminal time point, limited distinction between viral RNA and true infection, and technical confounders such as PMIs. Nevertheless, our methods would enable studies in diverse diseased or damaged tissues. Future meta-analyses will further enhance its power and provide crucial resources for the community studying host–SARS-CoV-2 biology.”

      But the mechanisms should be the for long living covid people.

Leave a Reply to Neil B Cancel reply

Email address is optional. If provided, your email will not be published or shared.