November 10, 2023
Bulletin interne de l'Institut Pasteur
The SARS-CoV-2 virus can migrate within neurons and infect the brain
The emergence of different variants of SARS-CoV-2 has produced a wide range of clinical profiles and symptoms in patients. For the first time, researchers at the Institut Pasteur and Université Paris Cité have demonstrated, in an animal model, a characteristic common to several SARS-CoV-2 variants: the ability to infect the central nervous system. The study confirms that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting human neurons in vitro and migrating into axons, the nerve cell projections that carry information.