Increasing Host Cellular Receptor—Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2) Expression by Coronavirus may Facilitate 2019-nCoV Infection

Pei-Hui Wang; Yun Cheng

We suppose that ACE2 induction by viruses is caused by virus infection-induced inflammatory cytokines. From the microarray database, we observed that ACE2 expression can also be stimulated by type I IFNs including IFNα and IFNβ and type III IFN such as IFNγ. In human bronchial epithelial cells stimulated by IFNβ (1000U/ml), ACE2 is significantly upregulated at 6, 8, 12, and 18 hours post treatment, especially at 18 hours (Figure 7) , ACE2 is increased more than 4-folds comparing with the mock group (Shapira et al., 2009) . We also found that ACE2 can be significantly induced by IFNγ treatment in human primary keratinocytes (Figure 8) . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.24.963348 doi: bioRxiv preprint 1 7 / 2 2 (Swindell et al., 2012) . Taken together, ACE2 mRNA is increased in response to inflammatory cytokine stimulation.