Knowledge synthesis from 100 million biomedical documents augments the deep expression profiling of coronavirus receptors

AJ Venkatakrishnan; Arjun Puranik; Akash Anand; David Zemmour; Xiang Yao; Xiaoying Wu; Ramakrishna Chilaka; Dariusz K Murakowski; Kristopher Standish; Bharathwaj Raghunathan; Tyler Wagner; Enrique Garcia-Rivera; Hugo Solomon; Abhinav Garg; Rakesh Barve; Anuli Anyanwu-Ofili; Najat Khan; Venky Soundararajan

In a recent clinical study of COVID-19 patients from China, 48% of the 191 infected patients studied had comorbidities such as hypertension and diabetes 9 . Epidemiological and clinical investigations on COVID-19 patients are also suggesting fecal viral shedding and gastrointestinal infection [10] [11] [12] . In the case of the earlier SARS epidemic, multiple organ damage involving lung, kidney and heart was reported 13 . The mechanisms by which various comorbidities impact the clinical course of infections and the reasons for the observed multi-organ phenotypes are still not well understood. Thus, there is an urgent need to conduct a comprehensive pan-tissue profiling of ACE2, the putative human receptor for SARS-CoV-2.