Highly ACE2 Expression in Pancreas May Cause Pancreas Damage After SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Furong Liu; Xin Long; Wenbin Zou; Minghao Fang; Wenjuan Wu; Wei Li; Bixiang Zhang; Wanguang Zhang; Xiaoping Chen; Zhanguo Zhang

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) , a novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 in humans, began to occur in Wuhan (China) in December 2019 and has the trend of spreading around the world [1, 2, 3] . By February 28, 2020, a total of 78962 people had been infected in China with 2791 (3.53%) deaths, and 4838 people had been infected with 76 (1.57%) deaths in other countries. It was confirmed by etiology that SARS-CoV-2 belonged to the novel coronavirus of the subgenus Sarbecovirus (Beta-CoV lineage B), and had 79.5% similarity with SARS-CoV [4] , which caused the global outbreak in 2003. Spike (S) protein, one of the main structural proteins of SARS-CoV-2, binds angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) protein of the host cell membrane to fuse into the cell for nucleic acid replication just similar to SARS-CoV [5] . Through a variety of bioinformatics and experimental verification, ACE2 is not only expressed in alveolar epithelial cells, but also in the heart, gastrointestinal tract, kidney, testis and other organs, which means that SARS-CoV-2 is likely to enter other tissues and organs through ACE2 binding, causing multiple organ damage [6, 7] .