Highlights d A hPSC-derived cell and organoid platform is used to study SARS-CoV-2 tissue tropism d Human pancreatic alpha and beta cells are permissive to SARS-CoV-2 infection d Human hepatocyte and cholangiocyte organoids are permissive to SARS-CoV-2 infection d hPSC-derived cells/organoids show similar chemokine responses as COVID-19 tissues
There is an urgent need to create novel models using human disease-relevant cells to study SARS-CoV-2 biology and to facilitate drug screening. As SARS-CoV-2 primarily infects the respiratory tract, we developed a lung organoid model using human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC-LOs). The hPSC-LOs, particularly alveolar type II-like cells, are permissive to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and showed robust induction of chemokines upon SARS-CoV-2 infection, similar to what is seen in COVID-19 patients. Nearly 25% of these patients also have gastrointestinal manifestations, which are associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes 1. We therefore also generated complementary hPSC-derived colonic organoids (hPSC-COs) to explore the response of colonic cells to SARS-CoV-2 infection. We found that multiple colonic cell types, especially enterocytes, express ACE2 and are permissive to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Using hPSC-LOs, we performed a high throughput screen of FDA-approved drugs and identified entry inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2, including imatinib, mycophenolic acid (MPA), and quinacrine dihydrochloride (QNHC). Treatment at physiologically relevant levels of these drugs significantly inhibited SARS-CoV-2 infection of both hPSC-LOs and hPSC-COs. Together, these data demonstrate that hPSC-LOs and hPSC-COs infected by SARS-CoV-2 can serve as disease models to study SARS-CoV-2 infection and provide a valuable resource for drug screening to identify candidate COVID-19 therapeutics. The development of anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs could change the scope of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While this strategy is being pursued, high throughput screens are typically performed in transformed cell lines which fail to capture the physiologically relevant dynamics of human SARS-CoV-2 infection. To overcome limitations of these cell lines, several adult organoid models have been developed to study SARS-CoV-2 2-4. Here, we developed human pluripotent stem cell-derived lung and colonic organoids (hPSC-LOs and hPSC-COs) optimized as in vitro platforms for high throughput drug screening. hPSC-LOs are permissive to SARS-CoV-2 We differentiated hPSCs to lung organoids (hPSC-LOs) based on previously reported stepwise strategies 5-13 (Extended Data Fig. 1a-1c). qRT-PCR and RNA-seq profiling validates the expression of alveolar type II (AT2) cell markers in the hPSC-LOs (Extended Data Fig. 1d, 1e). Intra-cellular flow cytometry further confirmed the presence of Pro-SP-C + cells in hPSC-LOs (Extended Data Fig. 1f). Single cell transcriptomic profiles of hPSC-LOs identified AT2-like cells, which were enriched for adult human lung AT2 cell markers (Fig. 1a-1c and Extended Data Fig. 2a-2c).
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