Stanford Medicine scientists pinpoint COVID-19 virus’s entry and exit ports inside our noses

Somebody just coughed on you. On a plane. At a dinner party. In a supermarket line. If only there were a “morning after” nasal spray that could knock out respiratory viruses’ ability to colonize your nose and throat. In a study publishing today in the print issue of Cell, Peter Jackson, PhD, a Stanford Medicine professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology, and his colleagues brought that possibility closer to reality by pinpointing the routes that SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, takes to enter and exit cells in our nasal cavity. “Our upper airways are the launchpad not only for infection of our lungs but for transmission to others,” Jackson said. Jackson shares senior authorship of the study — the first to describe COVID-19 nasal infection in molecular detail — with Raul Andino, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at UC San Francisco. The lead authors are former Stanford Medicine postdoctoral scholar Chien-ting...