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

Relevant scientific literature related to key COVID-19 morbidities was retrieved from PubMed. For terms returning more than 100,000 papers ("hypertension," "smoking," and "asthma"), only the most recent 100,000 papers were analyzed. Full papers and abstracts were annotated to identify all genes, diseases, and species appearing in the title or abstract using the PubTator Central API [15] . This open source tool uses TaggerOne for disease annotations, GNormPlus for gene annotations, and SR4GN for species annotations [15] . The data were filtered to retain only papers containing a human species annotation. Next, every possible combination of gene and disease annotation within the title and abstract of each paper was generated. Only gene-disease terms with at least four documents supporting it, and those with a proximity less than or equal to the median sentence length of the paper section were retained.