Research Solutions for Coronavirus – Neuromics

Recent research shows the SARS-CoV2 virus penetrates the blood-brain barrier (BBB), causing neurological damage. Patients have reported both short-term and long-term neurological issues stemming from the virus.

SARS-CoV2 enters the central nervous system (CNS) by binding to the ACE-2 receptors on human brain endothelial cells (HBECs) and human astrocytes (HAs) that form the BBB. After infecting HBECs and HAs, the virus alters the tight junctions of the BBB to pass through and infect microglia of the CNS (Reynolds et al. 2021).

Neuromics 3D human blood-brain barrier model (cat. no. 3D45002) is the perfect tool for researchers studying the virus’ impact on the brain, as we continue to generate data demonstrating that our model truly mimics the properties of the BBB. Our model is developed to be highly reproducible, utilizing co-cultures of our human brain microvascular endothelial cells (cat. no. HEC02), human brain astrocytes (cat. no. HMP202), and human brain microvascular pericytes (cat. no. HMP104) layered in inserts to form the same tight junctions present in the BBB.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect lives everywhere across the globe, Neuromics has begun to manufacture Molecular Transport Media (MTM). For the next few months, we will be filling hundreds of thousands of tubes with MTM to be used in COVID-19 testing.

This new media deactivates the COVID-19 virus and extracts its genetic material for simple PCR diagnosis.

We’d like to say a big thank you to our team for working around the clock to get MTM production up and running.

In addition to MTM, we continue to manufacture Virus Transport Media. Currently, we have up to 50,000 15 ml tubes with 3 ml VTM available. Email us at technical@stratech.co.uk if you have any need for a transport media.

Along with MTM and VTM, we have many more products that are perfect for COVID-19 testing and research tasks.

Better understanding the COVID-19 virus is key in developing therapeutics that could help end the pandemic. At Neuromics, we offer many reagents that can be used in COVID-19 research, including human cells, antibodies, and more.

Recently, researchers from Emory University released their preliminary findings on the pathogenesis of severe COVID-19 using our Human Small Intestine Endothelial Cells.

Image: Detected auto Ig levels in specific cell types, including our human small intestine endothelial cells (HSIMEC)

Researchers looked at the plasma of COVID-19 patients and compared it to healthy patients. They discovered that a high proportion of plasma from critically ill COVID-19 patients contained auto-reactive immunoglobulin M (IgM) and infrequently auto-reactive IgG or IgA when compared to the plasma from the control group. They also looked at how the auto-IgM cells recognized various cell types in vitro. This research suggests IgM-mediated autoimmune reactivity may play a role in severe COVID-19, and could be looked at as a therapeutic target.

Citation

1. Cheryl Maier, Andrew Wong, Isaac Woodhouse, Frank Schneider, Deanna Kulpa, and Guido Silvestri. (2020). Broad Auto-Reactive IgM Responses Are Common in Critically Ill COVID-19 Patients.Research Square. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-128348/v1

During the past few months, Neuromics has devoted much of our attention and expertise to helping how we are able during this pandemic. Much of this focus has been and continues to be spent on manufacturing and supplying virus transport media to those who need it. However, we are also excited to offer three new antibodies that are perfect for researching COVID-19. These SARS-CoV2 S-Protein ACE2 Binding Domain antibodies can help us better understand the virus and are perfect for vaccine research.

Image: Cells were transfected with the DNA encoding the S-protein segment in SARS-CoV2 binding domain protein which was inserted in the pCI-Neo-Mod expression vector. MO22195 produces clean and specific staining of transfected cells. The nuclei of transfected and untransfected cells are shown in blue with DAPI DNA stain.

The SARS-CoV2 virus’ spike or S-protein has been shown to interact with the ACE2 protein to bind and infect human cells. Our antibodies take advantage of this knowledge, allowing us to make antibodies to the ACE2 binding site of the SARS-CoV2 S-Protein. This allows research that can identify the presence of the SARS-CoV2 virus in western blots or immunofluorescence images (as seen in the images above and below).

Image: Western blot analysis of HEK293 cell lysates using rabbit pAb to SARS-CoV2-bd protein, RA22140, dilution 1:2,000 in green: [1] protein standard, [2] non-transfected cells, [3] cells transfected with pCI-Neo-Mod vector containing the SARS-Cov-bd cDNA, and [4] cells transfected with pCI-Neo-GFP vector containing the SARS-CoV-bd cDNA. The band at 25kDa in lane 2 demonstrates expression of SARS-CoV-bd protein, and the band at about 50kDa in lane 3 corresponds to GFP-SARS-CoV-bd fusion protein.