Could Endogenous Glucocorticoids Influence SARS-CoV-2 Infectivity?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Endogenous glucocorticoids and their synthetic analogues, such as dexamethasone, stimulate receptor-mediated signal transduction mechanisms on target cells. Some of these mechanisms result in beneficial outcomes whereas others are deleterious in the settings of pathogen infections and immunological disorders. Here, we review recent studies by several groups, including our group, showing that glucocorticoids can directly interact with protein components on SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. We postulate an antiviral defence mechanism by which endogenous glucocorticoids (e.g., cortisol produced in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection) can bind to multiple sites on SARS-CoV-2 surface protein, Spike, inducing conformational alterations in Spike subunit 1 (S1) that inhibit SARS-CoV-2 interaction with the host SARS-CoV-2 receptor, ACE2. We suggest that glucocorticoids-mediated inhibition of S1 interaction with ACE2 may, consequently, affect SARS-CoV-2 infectivity. Further, glucocorticoids interactions with Spike could protect against a broad spectrum of coronaviruses and their variants that utilize Spike for infection of the host. These notions may be useful for the design of new antivirals for coronavirus diseases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".