London: Scientists have worked out how a deadly new virus which was unknown in humans until last year is able to infect human cells and cause severe, potentially fatal damage to the lungs.
In one of the first detailed studies of the virus — which emerged in the Middle East and has so far infected 15 people worldwide, killing nine of them — Dutch researchers identified a cell surface protein it uses to enter and infect human cells.
The finding, published in the journal Nature, came as the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed the 15th case of the virus, known as novel coronavirus or NCoV, in a male patient in Saudi Arabia who died on March 2.
Other cases have been in Jordan and Qatar, and in patients in Germany and Britain linked to travel in the Middle East.
NCoV is from the same family of viruses as those that cause common colds and the one that caused the deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that first emerged in Asia in 2003.
The WHO first issued an international alert about it in September after it was identified in a Qatari man in Britain who had recently been in Saudi Arabia.
A study published last month found that NCoV was well adapted to infecting human cells and may be treatable with medicines similar to the ones used for SARS, which killed a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected.
In this latest study, led by Bart Haagmans at the Erasmus Medical Centre in The Netherlands, researchers set out to find how the virus got into cells — which receptors it used — and then to find out where in the body those receptors were common.
