Airways Expression of SARS-CoV-2 Receptor, ACE2, and TMPRSS2 Is Lower in Children Than Adults and Increases with Smoking and COPD
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been reported that angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and transmembrane serine protease 2 (TMPRSS2) are the main cell entry proteins for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and play a critical role in causing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). To investigate the expression level of these SARS-CoV-2 host cell entry genes in the lung airway, we used public gene expression datasets. We have found a differential expression of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 in nasal and bronchial airways relative to age and diseases status. Children were found to have significantly lower expression of COVID-19 receptors in the upper and lower airways (nasal and bronchial). Moreover, the lung airway expression of both ACE2 and TMPRSS2 was found to be significantly upregulated in smokers compared with non-smokers, and in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) compared with healthy subjects. No difference was observed in the blood expression levels of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 between children and adults, or in COPD or diabetic patients. However, a significant increase in blood expression levels of these genes was observed in patients with essential hypertension, whereas only ACE2 was upregulated in the blood of asthmatics. These results suggest that the observed difference in COVID-19 severity between children and adults could, in part, be attributed to the difference in ACE2 and TMPRSS2 airways tissue expression levels.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it