cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos ............
SARS-CoV-2 epidemics raises a considerable issue of public health at the planetary scale. There is a pressing urgency to find treatments based upon currently available scientific knowledge. Therefore, we tentatively propose a hypothesis which hopeful...
www.qeios.com
All I can say about that article is "interesting". Among scientists, that's a polite way of saying "while I can't positively rule out what you say, I also don't believe it myself". Interesting, very interesting
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To be more fair, I can say this is a review article that is entirely speculation, a thought experiment, without any data. It has no positive findings regarding Covid-19 or SARS-CoV-2 to talk about. Like all speculation, it may or may not be right. There is no data to support it, and there is no data to rule it out.
The
Hoffman et al. paper that I previously talked about involved searching for genes whose expression in single cells were necessary for viral infection. It showed that two genes, ACE2 and TMPSS2 were necessary. In a cultured lung cell model, expression of these two genes was sufficient for viral infection to take place. And a drug, camostat mesilate, that inhibits the action of TMPSS2 could prevent viral uptake by lung cells. That's good evidence to support their ACE2 and TMPSS2 hypothesis.
The authors of that paper had nothing to say about the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR). I would hope their search method would have come up with other possible viral entry mechanisms such as nAChR. It apparently didn't. But at this point I can't definitively rule out the nAChR hypothesis.
So, it is possible that there may be more than one mechanism of SARS-Cov-2 viral infection and Covid-19 disease causation. We'll see if anyone follows up on this idea. That's how science works. Many ideas get put out there for consideration. If we're lucky, one idea takes root, experimental data accumulates to support it, and the other ideas get ignored or disproved.
