Already at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of Brazilian researchers pioneered in showing why SARS-CoV-2 infection tends to be more severe in diabetic patients. Now, the same team based at the Institute of Biology of the State University of Campinas (IB-UNICAMP) has discovered one of the reasons why obese people who do not have diabetes or even insulin resistance also have an increased risk of developing the severe form of the disease.
“New experiments show that the molecular mechanisms are quite different in the two cases,” Pedro Moraes-Vieira, a professor at IB-UNICAMP, who is coordinating the research, told Agência FAPESP.
The research is supported by two projects (20/16030-0 and 20/04579-7) and is also linked to the Obesity and Comorbidities Research Center (OCRC) – a FAPESP Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center (RIDC) based at UNICAMP.
The data were presented on June 30 at a panel discussion on health and biomedicine as part of the FAPESP Week China program.
In an article published in May 2020, the UNICAMP group showed that in diabetics infected with SARS-CoV-2, the higher glucose content in the blood is picked up by a type of defense cell known as monocytes and serves as an extra source of energy that allows the virus to replicate more than in a healthy organism. In response to the growing viral load, the monocytes release large amounts of cytokines (inflammatory proteins), which cause a variety of effects, including the death of lung cells. The researchers also reported that in the lungs of patients with severe COVID-19, monocytes and macrophages were the most abundant cells. And that the so-called glycolytic pathway, which metabolizes glucose, was greatly increased in these leukocytes (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/33296).