ACE2 Expression is Increased in the Lungs of Patients with Comorbidities Associated with Severe COVID-19

Bruna GG Pinto; Antonio ER Oliveira; Youvika Singh; Leandro Jimenez; Andre NA Goncalves; Rodrigo LT Ogava; Rachel Creighton; Jean PS Peron; Helder I Nakaya

To identify the genes highly associated with key comorbidities of severe COVID-19 [1, 3] , we mined all relevant scientific literature of these human diseases. Specifically, over 8,000 abstracts containing the terms "pulmonary hypertension," "chronic obstructive pulmonary disease," "hypertension," "smoking," "pulmonary fibrosis," or "asthma" in the title or abstract were selected (Figure 1a ). Our text-mining analysis revealed 804 genes highly associated with one or more COVID-19 morbidities (Figure 1b) . Among those genes, 26 were associated with four or more diseases (Figure 1c ). Although ACE2 was known to be related to "Cardiovascular Diseases", "Familial Primary Pulmonary Hypertension", "Hypertension, Pulmonary", and "Hypertension", none of the articles containing this gene-disease association studied how ACE2 expression was altered in the lungs of patients with these diseases. Text-mining approach to retrieve genes in abstracts associated with six human diseases.