A team of researchers from Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBIS) and the National Center for Biology (CNB) proved it a vaccine from the Superior Center for Scientific Research (CSIC) against covid-19 protects against infections and brain damage caused by the virus.
Although pathology of the respiratory system is the main manifestation of the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, many of the patients experience “major neurological symptoms”, such as loss of smell, headache, general malaise, cognitive loss, epilepsy, ataxia and encephalopathy, among others.
However, this coronavirus influence of the nervous system has not been characterized in detail, and it is not known whether the vaccines developed against covid-19 prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to the central nervous system and confer protection against brain infections . injuries.
Using a mouse model susceptible to coronavirus infection, a multidisciplinary team of physician-led Spanish researchers Javier Villadiego and Juan José Toledo Aral (IBiS, Ciberned and Department of Medical Physiology and Biophysics of the Medical Faculty of Seville) and Juan García Arriaza (Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the CNB-CSIC), in collaboration with other groups of the University of Seville and CSIC they demonstrated the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect different brain regions and cause brain damage, and how the CNB-CSIC vaccine “completely protects” against said infection in the brain.
These results were published in the journal “Neuroscience of nature”. The researchers studied the evolution of the viral infection in different brain regions, observing that virus replication mainly occurs in neurons, producing neuropathological changes such as neuronal loss, glial activation and vascular damage. “We carried out a very detailed anatomo-pathological and molecular study of the brain regions and cell types that were infected by the virus, and it is remarkable how the virus mainly infects neurons in different areas,” explains Villadiego.
Once the SARS-CoV-2 infection pattern in the brain was established, the researchers evaluated the efficacy of the vaccine developed by the CNB-CSIC.
“The results obtained were spectacular, demonstrating that even the administration of a single dose of the MVA-CoV2-S vaccine completely prevents SARS-CoV-2 infection in all brain regions studied and prevents associated brain damage, even after a reinfection with the virus, which demonstrates the great efficacy and immunogenic power of the vaccine that induces sterilizing immunity in the brain”, indicates Juan García Arriaza.
The findings have “important long-term implications” for understanding SARS-CoV-2 infection. “The data we obtained on SARS-CoV-2 infection in the brain are compatible with the neurological pathology observed in covid-19 patients,” underlines José López Barneo, IBiS researcher who participated in the publication.
