Abstract
This webinar will discuss a study that identified a link between male sex hormones and COVID-19 disease severity in men and also pointed toward possible therapeutic candidates for the disease.
Dr. Hani Goodarzi of the University of California, San Francisco, will share details of the work, which was based on the premise that SARS-CoV-2 infection occurs through binding of the viral spike protein to angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) on the host cell membrane.
Dr. Goodarzi and colleagues used a high-throughput drug screening strategy to identify therapeutic candidates that reduce ACE2 levels in cardiac cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Analysis of validated hit compounds pointed to the central role of androgen signaling in ACE2 expression.
Treatment with antiandrogenic drugs, as well as in silico-derived compounds predicted to target this pathway, reduced ACE2 expression and protected hESC-derived lung organoids against SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Finally, clinical data on COVID-19 patients demonstrated that prostate diseases, which are linked to elevated androgen, are significant risk factors for severe COVID-19 and that genetic variants that increase androgen levels are associated with higher disease severity.
Dr. Goodarzi will discuss how these findings offer insights on the basis of differential susceptibility between men and women and suggest antiandrogenic drugs as candidate therapeutics for COVID-19.
Speaker’s biography
Hani Goodarzi, PhD
Assistant Professor,
Department of Biophysics & Biochemistry
University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Hani Goodarzi is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. With a dual background in computational and experimental genomics, he brings a multidisciplinary approach to studying human disease. His research is focused on developing strategies that enable an unbiased search for previously unknown regulatory programs that drive oncogenesis, metastasis, and neurodegeneration. By developing novel technologies for genome-wide measurement of hard-to-quantify RNA molecules, he has made key discoveries about the role of oncRNA, tRNAs, and tRNA fragments in cancer progression. On the computational front, Dr. Goodarzi is focused on building network analytical models that help elucidate key pathways and processes that drive human disease. Most recently, for his contributions to cancer research, he was awarded the AACR-MPM Transformative Cancer Research Award. He was previously a recipient of the Martin and Rose Wachtel Award in Cancer Research and is a Kimmel scholar.
