A major hurdle to developing and testing new anti-viral therapies and vaccines for COVID-19 is the lack of good, widely available animal models of the disease. But an international team of researchers has developed a simple tool that they hope will help resolve this issue.
They created a gene therapy approach that can convert any lab mouse into one that can be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and develops COVID-like lung disease.
The gene therapy vector has now been made freely available to any researchers who want to use it.
Lead researcher Paul McCray said: “There is a pressing need to understand this disease and to develop preventions and treatments.
“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for other researchers to have access to this technology, which allows any lab to be able to immediately start working in this area by using this trick.”
