Image of healthy heart muscle cells and SARS-CoV-2 infected heart cells with fragmented sarcomeres

‘Carnage’ in a lab dish shows how the coronavirus may damage the heart

Maybe we should think of Covid-19 as a heart disease.

When SARS-CoV-2 virus was added to human heart cells grown in lab dishes, the long muscle fibers that keep hearts beating were diced into short bits, alarming scientists at the San Francisco-based Gladstone Institutes, especially after they saw a similar phenomenon in heart tissue from Covid-19 patients’ autopsies.

Their experiments could potentially explain why some people still feel short of breath after their Covid infections clear and add to worries that survivors may be at risk for future heart failure.

The new study was posted as a preprint on bioRxiv, meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed or otherwise vetted by a scientific journal. The authors said they felt an urgent need to share their work so others could help them understand the mechanisms causing heart damage and work on ways to prevent or treat it.

“When we saw this disruption in those microfibers, … that was when we made the decision to pull the trigger and put out this preprint,” said Todd McDevitt, a senior investigator at Gladstone and a co-author of the study. “I’m not a scientist who likes to stoke these things [but] I did not sleep, honestly, while we were finishing this paper and putting it out there.”

His colleague Bruce Conklin, a senior investigator at Gladstone and a co-author, said the “carnage in the human cells” they saw was unlike anything that’s been previously described with other diseases. “Nothing that we see in the published literature is like this in terms of this exact cutting and precise dicing. We should think about this as not only a pulmonary disease, but also potentially a cardiac one.”

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Infectious Disease

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Gladstone Institutes

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