Rodent to Recovery

To unpick how a disease works and test new treatments, scientists study animals that can be infected with the same pathogen. For COVID-19, hamsters and mice have been the most useful, but we don't have a detailed understanding of the disease in these animals. Here, we see lung cells from a mouse with COVID-19 – the infected alveolar cells (green) contain a viral protein (red). In hamsters, the virus targets a different type of lung cell in the bronchus, but that's just one of the striking differences in how these two rodents react to COVID-19. Mice die within a week as the infection escapes their lungs to damage other organs. Hamsters restrict the virus to their lungs and successfully fight it off. The effects of COVID-19 vary widely among people too, and these two models capture different aspects of human disease. Understanding them better may bring the next generation of COVID-19 treatments.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Image from work by Haengdueng Jeong, Youn Woo Lee, In Ho Park, Hyuna Noh and colleagues
• Brain Korea 21 FOUR Project for Medical Science, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, Seongnam & Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, November 2022